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Of the various anti-hacker activities of 1990, "Operation Sundevil"
had by far the highest public profile. The sweeping, nationwide
computer seizures of May 8, 1990 were unprecedented in scope and
highly, if rather selectively, publicized.
Unlike the efforts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force, "Operation Sundevil" was not intended to combat "hacking" in
the sense of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco
switching stations. Nor did it have anything to do with hacker
misdeeds with AT&T's software, or with Southern Bell's proprietary
documents.
Instead, "Operation Sundevil" was a crackdown on those traditional
scourges of the digital underground: credit-card theft and telephone
code abuse. The ambitious activities out of Chicago, and the
somewhat lesser-known but vigorous antihacker actions of the New
York State Police in 1990, were never a part of "Operation Sundevil"
per se, which was based in Arizona.
Nevertheless, after the spectacular May 8 raids, the public, misled
by police secrecy, hacker panic, and a puzzled national press-corps,
conflated all aspects of the nationwide crackdown in 1990 under the
blanket term "Operation Sundevil." "Sundevil" is still the best-
known synonym for the crackdown of 1990. But the Arizona organizers
of "Sundevil" did not really deserve this reputation -- any more,
for instance, than all hackers deserve a reputation as "hackers."
There was some justice in this confused perception, though. For one
thing, the confusion was abetted by the Washington office of the
Secret Service, who responded to Freedom of Information Act requests
on "Operation Sundevil" by referring investigators to the publicly
known cases of Knight Lightning and the Atlanta Three. And
"Sundevil" was certainly the largest aspect of the Crackdown, the
most deliberate and the best-organized. As a crackdown on electronic
fraud, "Sundevil" lacked the frantic pace of the war on the Legion
of Doom; on the contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out with
cool deliberation over an elaborate investigation lasting two full
years.
And once again the targets were bulletin board systems.
Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud. Underground boards
carry lively, extensive, detailed, and often quite flagrant
"discussions" of lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities.
"Discussing" crime in the abstract, or "discussing" the particulars
of criminal cases, is not illegal -- but there are stern state and
federal laws against coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to
commit crimes.
In the eyes of police, people who actively conspire to break the law
are not regarded as "clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or
"free speech advocates." Rather, such people tend to find themselves
formally indicted by prosecutors as "gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt
organizations" and "organized crime figures."
What's more, the illicit data contained on outlaw boards goes well
beyond mere acts of speech and/or possible criminal conspiracy. As
we have seen, it was common practice in the digital underground to
post purloined telephone codes on boards, for any phreak or hacker
who cared to abuse them. Is posting digital booty of this sort
supposed to be protected by the First Amendment? Hardly -though the
issue, like most issues in cyberspace, is not entirely resolved.
Some theorists argue that to merely recite a number publicly is not
illegal - only its use is illegal. But anti-hacker police point out
that magazines and newspapers (more traditional forms of free
expression) never publish stolen telephone codes (even though this
might well raise their circulation).
Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable, were
less often publicly posted on boards -- but there is no question
that some underground boards carried "carding" traffic, generally
exchanged through private mail.
Underground boards also carried handy programs for "scanning"
telephone codes and raiding credit card companies, as well as the
usual obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-
box schematics, intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so
forth.
But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit
knowledge, bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect
for the professional investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of
evidence. All that busy trading of electronic mail, all those hacker
boasts, brags and struts, even the stolen codes and cards, can be
neat, electronic, realtime recordings of criminal activity. As an
investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you have scored a coup
as effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail. However, you
have not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter. The rules
of evidence regarding phone-taps and mail interceptions are old,
stern and wellunderstood by police, prosecutors and defense
attorneys alike. The rules of evidence regarding boards are new,
waffling, and understood by nobody at all.
Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in world history. On
May 7, 8, and 9, 1990, about fortytwo computer systems were seized.
Of those forty- two computers, about twenty-five actually were
running boards. (The vagueness of this estimate is attributable to
the vagueness of (a) what a "computer system" is, and (b) what it
actually means to "run a board" with one -- or with two computers,
or with three.)
About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990.
As we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America
today. If we assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good
with codes and cards (which rather flatters the honesty of the
board-using community), then that would leave 2,975 outlaw boards
untouched by Sundevil. Sundevil seized about one tenth of one
percent of all computer bulletin boards in America. Seen
objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive assault. In
1990, Sundevil's organizers -- the team at the Phoenix Secret
Service office, and the Arizona Attorney General's office -had a
list of at least three hundred boards that they considered fully
deserving of search and seizure warrants. The twenty- five boards
actually seized were merely among the most obvious and egregious of
this much larger list of candidates. All these boards had been
examined beforehand -- either by informants, who had passed
printouts to the Secret Service, or by Secret Service agents
themselves, who not only come equipped with modems but know how to
use them.
There were a number of motives for Sundevil. First, it offered a
chance to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes. Tracking back
credit-card ripoffs to their perpetrators can be appallingly
difficult. If these miscreants have any kind of electronic
sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through the phone
network into a mind-boggling, untraceable mess, while still managing
to "reach out and rob someone." Boards, however, full of brags and
boasts, codes and cards, offer evidence in the handy congealed form.
Seizures themselves -- the mere physical removal of machines -
- tends to take the pressure off. During Sundevil, a large number of
code kids, warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived of
those boards -- their means of community and conspiracy -- in one
swift blow. As for the sysops themselves (commonly among the boldest
offenders) they would be directly stripped of their computer
equipment, and rendered digitally mute and blind.
And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with great success.
Sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise -- unlike
the fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of
Doom, Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming. At
least forty "computers" were seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in
Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Tucson,
Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Some
cities saw multiple raids, such as the five separate raids in the
New York City environs. Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of the
Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications
industry) saw four computer seizures. Chicago, ever in the
forefront, saw its own local Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by
Secret Service agents Timothy Foley and Barbara Golden.
Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in
associated white-middle class suburbs -- places like Mount Lebanon,
Pennsylvania and Clark Lake, Michigan. There were a few raids on
offices; most took place in people's homes, the classic hacker
basements and bedrooms.
The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of mass
arrests. There were only four arrests during Sundevil. "Tony the
Trashman," a longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona Racketeering
unit, was arrested in Tucson on May 9. "Dr. Ripco," sysop of an
outlaw board with the misfortune to exist in Chicago itself, was
also arrested -- on illegal weapons charges. Local units also
arrested a 19-year-old female phone phreak named "Electra" in
Pennsylvania, and a male juvenile in California. Federal agents
however were not seeking arrests, but computers.
Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in
their seized computers is evaluated -- a process that can take
weeks, months -even years. When hackers are arrested on the spot,
it's generally an arrest for other reasons. Drugs and/or illegal
weapons show up in a good third of anti-hacker computer seizures
(though not during Sundevil). That scofflaw teenage hackers (or
their parents) should have marijuana in their homes is probably not
a shocking revelation, but the surprisingly common presence of
illegal firearms in hacker dens is a bit disquieting. A Personal
Computer can be a great equalizer for the techno-cowboy -- much like
that more traditional American "Great Equalizer," the Personal
Sixgun. Maybe it's not all that surprising that some guy obsessed
with power through illicit technology would also have a few illicit
high-velocity-impact devices around. An element of the digital
underground particularly dotes on those "anarchy philes," and this
element tends to shade into the crackpot milieu of survivalists,
gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the ultra- libertarian right-wing.
This is not to say that hacker raids to date have uncovered any
major crack-dens or illegal arsenals; but Secret Service agents do
not regard "hackers" as "just kids." They regard hackers as
unpredictable people, bright and slippery. It doesn't help matters
that the hacker himself has been "hiding behind his keyboard" all
this time. Commonly, police have no idea what he looks like. This
makes him an unknown quantity, someone best treated with proper
caution.
To date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes
brag on boards that they will do just that. Threats of this sort are
taken seriously. Secret Service hacker raids tend to be swift,
comprehensive, well-manned (even overmanned); and agents generally
burst through every door in the home at once, sometimes with drawn
guns. Any potential resistance is swiftly quelled. Hacker raids are
usually raids on people's homes. It can be a very dangerous business
to raid an American home; people can panic when strangers invade
their sanctum. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a
policeman can do is to enter someone's home. (The second most
dangerous thing is to stop a car in traffic.) People have guns in
their homes. More cops are hurt in homes than are ever hurt in biker
bars or massage parlors.
But in any case, no one was hurt during Sundevil, or indeed during
any part of the Hacker Crackdown.
Nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a
suspect. Guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged;
but no one in 1990 claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown
raider.
In addition to the forty or so computers, Sundevil reaped floppy
disks in particularly great abundance -- an estimated 23,000 of
them, which naturally included every manner of illegitimate data:
pirated games, stolen codes, hot credit card numbers, the complete
text and software of entire pirate bulletin- boards. These floppy
disks, which remain in police custody today, offer a gigantic,
almost embarrassingly rich source of possible criminal indictments.
These 23,000 floppy disks also include a thus-far unknown quantity
of legitimate computer games, legitimate software, purportedly
"private" mail from boards, business records, and personal
correspondence of all kinds.
Standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on
seizing written documents as well as computers -- specifically
including photocopies, computer printouts, telephone bills, address
books, logs, notes, memoranda and correspondence. In practice, this
has meant that diaries, gaming magazines, software documentation,
nonfiction books on hacking and computer security, sometimes even
science fiction novels, have all vanished out the door in police
custody. A wide variety of electronic items have been known to
vanish as well, including telephones, televisions, answering
machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop printers, compact disks, and
audiotapes.
No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into the
field during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by squads of
local and/or state police. Most of these officers -especially the
locals -- had never been on an antihacker raid before. (This was one
good reason, in fact, why so many of them were invited along in the
first place.) Also, the presence of a uniformed police officer
assures the raidees that the people entering their homes are, in
fact, police. Secret Service agents wear plain clothes. So do the
telco security experts who commonly accompany the Secret Service on
raids (and who make no particular effort to identify themselves as
mere employees of telephone companies).
A typical hacker raid goes something like this. First, police storm
in rapidly, through every entrance, with overwhelming force, in the
assumption that this tactic will keep casualties to a minimum.
Second, possible suspects are immediately removed from the vicinity
of any and all computer systems, so that they will have no chance to
purge or destroy computer evidence. Suspects are herded into a room
without computers, commonly the living room, and kept under guard -
not armed guard, for the guns are swiftly holstered, but under guard
nevertheless. They are presented with the search warrant and warned
that anything they say may be held against them. Commonly they have
a great deal to say, especially if they are unsuspecting parents.
Somewhere in the house is the "hot spot" -- a computer tied to a
phone line (possibly several computers and several phones). Commonly
it's a teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the house;
there may be several such rooms. This "hot spot" is put in charge of
a two-agent team, the "finder" and the "recorder." The "finder" is
computer-trained, commonly the case agent who has actually obtained
the search warrant from a judge. He or she understands what is being
sought, and actually carries out the seizures: unplugs machines,
opens drawers, desks, files, floppy-disk containers, etc. The
"recorder" photographs all the equipment, just as it stands -
- especially the tangle of wired connections in the back, which can
otherwise be a real nightmare to restore. The recorder will also
commonly photograph every room in the house, lest some wily criminal
claim that the police had robbed him during the search. Some
recorders carry videocams or tape recorders; however, it's more
common for the recorder to simply take written notes. Objects are
described and numbered as the finder seizes them, generally on
standard preprinted police inventory forms.
Even Secret Service agents were not, and are not, expert computer
users. They have not made, and do not make, judgements on the fly
about potential threats posed by various forms of equipment. They
may exercise discretion; they may leave Dad his computer, for
instance, but they don't have to. Standard computer-crime search
warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use a sweeping language
that targets computers, most anything attached to a computer, most
anything used to operate a computer -- most anything that remotely
resembles a computer -- plus most any and all written documents
surrounding it. Computer-crime investigators have strongly urged
agents to seize the works.
In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to have been a complete
success. Boards went down all over America, and were shipped en
masse to the computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in
Washington DC, along with the 23,000 floppy disks and unknown
quantities of printed material.
But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte
mountains of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and
in their owners' other computers, also out the door), were far from
the only motives for Operation Sundevil. An unprecedented action of
great ambition and size, Sundevil's motives can only be described as
political. It was a public-relations effort, meant to pass certain
messages, meant to make certain situations clear: both in the mind
of the general public, and in the minds of various constituencies of
the electronic community.
First -- and this motivation was vital -- a "message" would be sent
from law enforcement to the digital underground. This very message
was recited in so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the Assistant
Director of the US Secret Service, at the Sundevil press conference
in Phoenix on May 9, 1990, immediately after the raids. In brief,
hackers were mistaken in their foolish belief that they could hide
behind the "relative anonymity of their computer terminals." On the
contrary, they should fully understand that state and federal cops
were actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace -- that they were on
the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens of
cybernetic vice, the underground boards.
This is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to
crooks. The message is a standard message; only the context is new.
In this respect, the Sundevil raids were the digital equivalent of
the standard vice-squad crackdown on massage parlors, porno
bookstores, head-shops, or floating crap-games. There may be few or
no arrests in a raid of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no
interrogations. In cases of this sort, police may well walk out the
door with many pounds of sleazy magazines, X-rated videotapes, sex
toys, gambling equipment, baggies of marijuana....
Of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the
raiders, there will be arrests and prosecutions. Far more likely,
however, there will simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the
closed and secretive world of the nogoodniks. There will be "street
hassle." "Heat." "Deterrence." And, of course, the immediate loss of
the seized goods. It is very unlikely that any of this seized
material will ever be returned. Whether charged or not, whether
convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely lack the nerve
ever to ask for this stuff to be given back.
Arrests and trials -- putting people in jail -- may involve all
kinds of formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is
far from the only task of police. Police do not simply arrest
people. They don't simply put people in jail. That is not how the
police perceive their jobs. Police "protect and serve." Police "keep
the peace," they "keep public order." Like other forms of public
relations, keeping public order is not an exact science. Keeping
public order is something of an art-form.
If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a
street- corner, no one would be surprised to see a street-cop arrive
and sternly order them to "break it up." On the contrary, the
surprise would come if one of these ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly
into a phone-booth, called a civil rights lawyer, and instituted a
civil suit in defense of his Constitutional rights of free speech
and free assembly. But something much along this line was one of the
many anomolous outcomes of the Hacker Crackdown.
Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other constituents of
the electronic community. These messages may not have been read
aloud from the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps, but there
was little mistaking their meaning. There was a message of
reassurance for the primary victims of coding and carding: the
telcos, and the credit companies. Sundevil was greeted with joy by
the security officers of the electronic business community. After
years of high-tech harassment and spiralling revenue losses, their
complaints of rampant outlawry were being taken seriously by law
enforcement. No more head- scratching or dismissive shrugs; no more
feeble excuses about "lack of computer-trained officers" or the low
priority of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication crimes.
Computer-crime experts have long believed that computer-related
offenses are drastically under-reported. They regard this as a major
open scandal of their field. Some victims are reluctant to come
forth, because they believe that police and prosecutors are not
computer-literate, and can and will do nothing. Others are
embarrassed by their vulnerabilities, and will take strong measures
to avoid any publicity; this is especially true of banks, who fear a
loss of investor confidence should an embezzlement-case or wire-
fraud surface. And some victims are so helplessly confused by their
own high technology that they never even realize that a crime has
occurred -- even when they have been fleeced to the bone.
The results of this situation can be dire. Criminals escape
apprehension and punishment. The computer-crime units that do exist,
can't get work. The true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real
nature, the scope of its threats, and the legal remedies for it -
- all remain obscured. Another problem is very little publicized,
but it is a cause of genuine concern. Where there is persistent
crime, but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can
result. Telcos, banks, credit companies, the major corporations who
maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking -- these
organizations are powerful, wealthy, and politically influential.
They are disinclined to be pushed around by crooks (or by most
anyone else, for that matter). They often maintain well- organized
private security forces, commonly run by experienced veterans of
military and police units, who have left public service for the
greener pastures of the private sector. For police, the corporate
security manager can be a powerful ally; but if this gentleman finds
no allies in the police, and the pressure is on from his board-of-
directors, he may quietly take certain matters into his own hands.
Nor is there any lack of disposable hired-help in the corporate
security business. Private security agencies -- the 'security
business' generally -- grew explosively in the 1980s. Today there
are spooky gumshoed armies of "security consultants," "rent-acops,"
"private eyes," "outside experts" -- every manner of shady operator
who retails in "results" and discretion. Or course, many of these
gentlemen and ladies may be paragons of professional and moral
rectitude. But as anyone who has read a hard-boiled detective novel
knows, police tend to be less than fond of this sort of private-
sector competition.
Companies in search of computer-security have even been known to
hire hackers. Police shudder at this prospect.
Police treasure good relations with the business community. Rarely
will you see a policeman so indiscreet as to allege publicly that
some major employer in his state or city has succumbed to paranoia
and gone off the rails. Nevertheless, police -- and computer police
in particular -- are aware of this possibility. Computer-crime
police can and do spend up to half of their business hours just
doing public relations: seminars, "dog and pony shows," sometimes
with parents' groups or computer users, but generally with their
core audience: the likely victims of hacking crimes. These, of
course, are telcos, credit card companies and large computerequipped
corporations. The police strongly urge these people, as good
citizens, to report offenses and press criminal charges; they pass
the message that there is someone in authority who cares,
understands, and, best of all, will take useful action should a
computer-crime occur. But reassuring talk is cheap. Sundevil offered
action.
The final message of Sundevil was intended for internal consumption
by law enforcement. Sundevil was offered as proof that the community
of American computer-crime police had come of age. Sundevil was
proof that enormous things like Sundevil itself could now be
accomplished. Sundevil was proof that the Secret Service and its
local law-enforcement allies could act like a welloiled machine --
(despite the hampering use of those scrambled phones). It was also
proof that the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit -the
sparkplug of Sundevil -- ranked with the best in the world in
ambition, organization, and sheer conceptual daring.
And, as a final fillip, Sundevil was a message from the Secret
Service to their longtime rivals in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. By Congressional fiat, both USSS and FBI formally
share jurisdiction over federal computer- crimebusting activities.
Neither of these groups has ever been remotely happy with this
muddled situation. It seems to suggest that Congress cannot make up
its mind as to which of these groups is better qualified. And there
is scarcely a G-man or a Special Agent anywhere without a very firm
opinion on that topic.
1.
For the neophyte, one of the most puzzling aspects of the crackdown
on hackers is why the United States Secret Service has anything at
all to do with this matter.
The Secret Service is best known for its primary public role: its
agents protect the President of the United States. They also guard
the President's family, the Vice President and his family, former
Presidents, and Presidential candidates. They sometimes guard
foreign dignitaries who are visiting the United States, especially
foreign heads of state, and have been known to accompany American
officials on diplomatic missions overseas.
Special Agents of the Secret Service don't wear uniforms, but the
Secret Service also has two uniformed police agencies. There's the
former White House Police (now known as the Secret Service Uniformed
Division, since they currently guard foreign embassies in
Washington, as well as the White House itself). And there's the
uniformed Treasury Police Force.
The Secret Service has been charged by Congress with a number of
little- known duties. They guard the precious metals in Treasury
vaults. They guard the most valuable historical documents of the
United States: originals of the Constitution, the Declaration of
Independence, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, an American-owned
copy of the Magna Carta, and so forth. Once they were assigned to
guard the Mona Lisa, on her American tour in the 1960s.
The entire Secret Service is a division of the Treasury Department.
Secret Service Special Agents (there are about 1,900 of them) are
bodyguards for the President et al, but they all work for the
Treasury. And the Treasury (through its divisions of the U.S. Mint
and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing) prints the nation's money.
As Treasury police, the Secret Service guards the nation's currency;
it is the only federal law enforcement agency with direct
jurisdiction over counterfeiting and forgery. It analyzes documents
for authenticity, and its fight against fake cash is still quite
lively (especially since the skilled counterfeiters of Medellin,
Columbia have gotten into the act). Government checks, bonds, and
other obligations, which exist in untold millions and are worth
untold billions, are common targets for forgery, which the Secret
Service also battles. It even handles forgery of postage stamps. But
cash is fading in importance today as money has become electronic.
As necessity beckoned, the Secret Service moved from fighting the
counterfeiting of paper currency and the forging of checks, to the
protection of funds transferred by wire.
From wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump to what is formally
known as "access device fraud." Congress granted the Secret Service
the authority to investigate "access device fraud" under Title 18 of
the United States Code (U.S.C. Section 1029).
The term "access device" seems intuitively simple. It's some kind of
high-tech gizmo you use to get money with. It makes good sense to
put this sort of thing in the charge of counterfeiting and wirefraud
experts.
However, in Section 1029, the term "access device" is very
generously defined. An access device is: "any card, plate, code,
account number, or other means of account access that can be used,
alone or in conjunction with another access device, to obtain money,
goods, services, or any other thing of value, or that can be used to
initiate a transfer of funds."
"Access device" can therefore be construed to include credit cards
themselves (a popular forgery item nowadays). It also includes
credit card account numbers, those standards of the digital
underground. The same goes for telephone charge cards (an
increasingly popular item with telcos, who are tired of being robbed
of pocket change by phone-booth thieves). And also telephone access
codes, those other standards of the digital underground. (Stolen
telephone codes may not "obtain money," but they certainly do obtain
valuable "services," which is specifically forbidden by Section
1029.)
We can now see that Section 1029 already pits the United States
Secret Service directly against the digital underground, without any
mention at all of the word "computer."
Standard phreaking devices, like "blue boxes," used to steal phone
service from old-fashioned mechanical switches, are unquestionably
"counterfeit access devices." Thanks to Sec.1029, it is not only
illegal to use counterfeit access devices, but it is even illegal to
build them. "Producing," "designing" "duplicating" or "assembling"
blue boxes are all federal crimes today, and if you do this, the
Secret Service has been charged by Congress to come after you.
Automatic Teller Machines, which replicated all over America during
the 1980s, are definitely "access devices," too, and an attempt to
tamper with their punch-in codes and plastic bank cards falls
directly under Sec. 1029.
Section 1029 is remarkably elastic. Suppose you find a computer
password in somebody's trash. That password might be a "code" -
- it's certainly a "means of account access." Now suppose you log on
to a computer and copy some software for yourself. You've certainly
obtained "service" (computer service) and a "thing of value" (the
software). Suppose you tell a dozen friends about your swiped
password, and let them use it, too. Now you're "trafficking in
unauthorized access devices." And when the Prophet, a member of the
Legion of Doom, passed a stolen telephone company document to Knight
Lightning at Phrack magazine, they were both charged under Sec.
1029!
There are two limitations on Section 1029. First, the offense must
"affect interstate or foreign commerce" in order to become a matter
of federal jurisdiction. The term "affecting commerce" is not well
defined; but you may take it as a given that the Secret Service can
take an interest if you've done most anything that happens to cross
a state line. State and local police can be touchy about their
jurisdictions, and can sometimes be mulish when the feds show up.
But when it comes to computercrime, the local police are
pathetically grateful for federal help -- in fact they complain that
they can't get enough of it. If you're stealing long-distance
service, you're almost certainly crossing state lines, and you're
definitely "affecting the interstate commerce" of the telcos. And if
you're abusing credit cards by ordering stuff out of glossy catalogs
from, say, Vermont, you're in for it. The second limitation is
money. As a rule, the feds don't pursue penny-ante offenders.
Federal judges will dismiss cases that appear to waste their time.
Federal crimes must be serious; Section 1029 specifies a minimum
loss of a thousand dollars. We now come to the very next section of
Title 18, which is Section 1030, "Fraud and related activity in
connection with computers." This statute gives the Secret Service
direct jurisdiction over acts of computer intrusion. On the face of
it, the Secret Service would now seem to command the field. Section
1030, however, is nowhere near so ductile as Section 1029. The first
annoyance is Section 1030(d), which reads:
"(d) The United States Secret Service shall, in addition to any
other agency having such authority, have the authority to
investigate offenses under this section. Such authority of the
United States Secret Service shall be exercised in accordance with
an agreement which shall be entered into by the Secretary of the
Treasury and the Attorney General." (Author's italics.)
The Secretary of the Treasury is the titular head of the Secret
Service, while the Attorney General is in charge of the FBI. In
Section (d), Congress shrugged off responsibility for the computer-
crime turf-battle between the Service and the Bureau, and made them
fight it out all by themselves. The result was a rather dire one for
the Secret Service, for the FBI ended up with exclusive jurisdiction
over computer break-ins having to do with national security, foreign
espionage, federally insured banks, and U.S. military bases, while
retaining joint jurisdiction over all the other computer intrusions.
Essentially, when it comes to Section 1030, the FBI not only gets
the real glamor stuff for itself, but can peer over the shoulder of
the Secret Service and barge in to meddle whenever it suits them.
The second problem has to do with the dicey term "Federal interest
computer." Section 1030(a)(2) makes it illegal to "access a computer
without authorization" if that computer belongs to a financial
institution or an issuer of credit cards (fraud cases, in other
words). Congress was quite willing to give the Secret Service
jurisdiction over money-transferring computers, but Congress balked
at letting them investigate any and all computer intrusions.
Instead, the USSS had to settle for the money machines and the
"Federal interest computers." A "Federal interest computer" is a
computer which the government itself owns, or is using. Large
networks of interstate computers, linked over state lines, are also
considered to be of "Federal interest." (This notion of "Federal
interest" is legally rather foggy and has never been clearly defined
in the courts. The Secret Service has never yet had its hand slapped
for investigating computer break-ins that were not of "Federal
interest," but conceivably someday this might happen.)
So the Secret Service's authority over "unauthorized access" to
computers covers a lot of territory, but by no means the whole ball
of cyberspatial wax. If you are, for instance, a local computer
retailer, or the owner of a local bulletin board system, then a
malicious local intruder can break in, crash your system, trash your
files and scatter viruses, and the U.S. Secret Service cannot do a
single thing about it.
At least, it can't do anything directly. But the Secret Service will
do plenty to help the local people who can.
The FBI may have dealt itself an ace off the bottom of the deck when
it comes to Section 1030; but that's not the whole story; that's not
the street. What's Congress thinks is one thing, and Congress has
been known to change its mind. The real turfstruggle is out there in
the streets where it's happening. If you're a local street-cop with
a computer problem, the Secret Service wants you to know where you
can find the real expertise. While the Bureau crowd are off having
their favorite shoes polished -- (wing-tips) -- and making derisive
fun of the Service's favorite shoes -- ("pansy-ass tassels") -the
tassel-toting Secret Service has a crew of readyand-able hacker-
trackers installed in the capital of every state in the Union. Need
advice? They'll give you advice, or at least point you in the right
direction. Need training? They can see to that, too.
If you're a local cop and you call in the FBI, the FBI (as is widely
and slanderously rumored) will order you around like a coolie, take
all the credit for your busts, and mop up every possible scrap of
reflected glory. The Secret Service, on the other hand, doesn't brag
a lot. They're the quiet types. Very quiet. Very cool. Efficient.
High-tech. Mirrorshades, icy stares, radio ear- plugs, an Uzi
machine-pistol tucked somewhere in that well-cut jacket. American
samurai, sworn to give their lives to protect our President. "The
granite agents." Trained in martial arts, absolutely fearless. Every
single one of 'em has a top-secret security clearance. Something
goes a little wrong, you're not gonna hear any whining and moaning
and political buck- passing out of these guys.
The facade of the granite agent is not, of course, the reality.
Secret Service agents are human beings. And the real glory in
Service work is not in battling computer crime -- not yet, anyway -
- but in protecting the President. The real glamour of Secret
Service work is in the White House Detail. If you're at the
President's side, then the kids and the wife see you on television;
you rub shoulders with the most powerful people in the world. That's
the real heart of Service work, the number one priority. More than
one computer investigation has stopped dead in the water when
Service agents vanished at the President's need.
There's romance in the work of the Service. The intimate access to
circles of great power; the espritde-corps of a highly trained and
disciplined elite; the high responsibility of defending the Chief
Executive; the fulfillment of a patriotic duty. And as police work
goes, the pay's not bad. But there's squalor in Service work, too.
You may get spat upon by protesters howling abuse -- and if they get
violent, if they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one of
them down -- discreetly.
The real squalor in Service work is drudgery such as "the
quarterlies," traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to
interview the various pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and
asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the President's life. And
then there's the grinding stress of searching all those faces in the
endless bustling crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis,
looking for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur Bremer, a Squeaky
Fromme, a Lee Harvey Oswald. It's watching all those grasping,
waving hands for sudden movements, while your ears strain at your
radio headphone for the long- rehearsed cry of "Gun!"
It's poring, in grinding detail, over the biographies of every
rotten loser who ever shot at a President. It's the unsung work of
the Protective Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous death
threats with all the meticulous tools of antiforgery techniques.
And it's maintaining the hefty computerized files on anyone who ever
threatened the President's life. Civil libertarians have become
increasingly concerned at the Government's use of computer files to
track American citizens - - but the Secret Service file of potential
Presidential assassins, which has upward of twenty thousand names,
rarely causes a peep of protest. If you ever state that you intend
to kill the President, the Secret Service will want to know and
record who you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up
to. If you're a serious threat -- if you're officially considered
"of protective interest" -- then the Secret Service may well keep
tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.
Protecting the President has first call on all the Service's
resources. But there's a lot more to the Service's traditions and
history than standing guard outside the Oval Office. The Secret
Service is the nation's oldest general federal law-enforcement
agency. Compared to the Secret Service, the FBI are new- hires and
the CIA are temps. The Secret Service was founded 'way back in 1865,
at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of
the Treasury. McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to
combat counterfeiting. Abraham Lincoln agreed that this seemed a
good idea, and, with a terrible irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that
very night by John Wilkes Booth.
The Secret Service originally had nothing to do with protecting
Presidents. They didn't take this on as a regular assignment until
after the Garfield assassination in 1881.
And they didn't get any Congressional money for it until President
McKinley was shot in 1901. The Service was originally designed for
one purpose: destroying counterfeiters.
2.
There are interesting parallels between the Service's nineteenth-
century entry into counterfeiting, and America's twentieth- century
entry into computer-crime.
In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible muddle. Security
was drastically bad. Currency was printed on the spot by local banks
in literally hundreds of different designs. No one really knew what
the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like. Bogus bills passed
easily. If some joker told you that a one-dollar bill from the
Railroad Bank of Lowell, Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a
shield, with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various
agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and some factories, then
you pretty much had to take his word for it. (And in fact he was
telling the truth!)
Sixteen hundred local American banks designed and printed their own
paper currency, and there were no general standards for security.
Like a badly guarded node in a computer network, badly designed
bills were easy to fake, and posed a security hazard for the entire
monetary system.
No one knew the exact extent of the threat to the currency. There
were panicked estimates that as much as a third of the entire
national currency was faked. Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers"
in the underground slang of the time -- were mostly technically
skilled printers who had gone to the bad. Many had once worked
printing legitimate currency. Boodlers operated in rings and gangs.
Technical experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in basements
in New York City. Smooth confidence men passed large wads of high-
quality, highdenomination fakes, including the really sophisticated
stuff -- government bonds, stock certificates, and railway shares.
Cheaper, botched fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of
boodler wannabes. (The really cheesy lowlife boodlers merely
upgraded real bills by altering face values, changing ones to fives,
tens to hundreds, and so on.) The techniques of boodling were
little-known and regarded with a certain awe by the midnineteenth-
century public. The ability to manipulate the system for rip-off
seemed diabolically clever. As the skill and daring of the boodlers
increased, the situation became intolerable. The federal government
stepped in, and began offering its own federal currency, which was
printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back - the original
"greenbacks." And at first, the improved security of the well-
designed, well-printed federal greenbacks seemed to solve the
problem; but then the counterfeiters caught on. Within a few years
things were worse than ever: a centralized system where all security
was bad!
The local police were helpless. The Government tried offering blood
money to potential informants, but this met with little success.
Banks, plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help and hired
private security men instead. Merchants and bankers queued up by the
thousands to buy privately-printed manuals on currency security,
slim little books like Laban Heath's Infallible Government
Counterfeit Detector. The back of the book offered Laban Heath's
patent microscope for five bucks. Then the Secret Service entered
the picture. The first agents were a rough and ready crew. Their
chief was one William P. Wood, a former guerilla in the Mexican War
who'd won a reputation busting contractor fraudsters for the War
Department during the Civil War. Wood, who was also Keeper of the
Capital Prison, had a sideline as a counterfeiting expert, bagging
boodlers for the federal bounty money.
Wood was named Chief of the new Secret Service in July 1865. There
were only ten Secret Service agents in all: Wood himself, a handful
who'd worked for him in the War Department, and a few former private
investigators -- counterfeiting experts -- whom Wood had won over to
public service. (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the size of the
Chicago Computer Fraud Task Force or the Arizona Racketeering Unit
of 1990.) These ten "Operatives" had an additional twenty or so
"Assistant Operatives" and "Informants." Besides salary and per
diem, each Secret Service employee received a whopping twenty-five
dollars for each boodler he captured.
Wood himself publicly estimated that at least half of America's
currency was counterfeit, a perhaps pardonable perception. Within a
year the Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters. They
busted about two hundred boodlers a year for four years straight.
Wood attributed his success to travelling fast and light, hitting
the bad- guys hard, and avoiding bureaucratic baggage. "Because my
raids were made without military escort and I did not ask the
assistance of state officers, I surprised the professional
counterfeiter."
Wood's social message to the once-impudent boodlers bore an eerie
ring of Sundevil: "It was also my purpose to convince such
characters that it would no longer be healthy for them to ply their
vocation without being handled roughly, a fact they soon
discovered."
William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla pioneer, did not end
well. He succumbed to the lure of aiming for the really big score.
The notorious Brockway Gang of New York City, headed by William E.
Brockway, the "King of the Counterfeiters," had forged a number of
government bonds. They'd passed these brilliant fakes on the
prestigious Wall Street investment firm of Jay Cooke and Company.
The Cooke firm were frantic and offered a huge reward for the
forgers' plates.
Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the plates (though not Mr.
Brockway) and claimed the reward. But the Cooke company
treacherously reneged. Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty lawsuit
with the Cooke capitalists. Wood's boss, Secretary of the Treasury
McCulloch, felt that Wood's demands for money and glory were
unseemly, and even when the reward money finally came through,
McCulloch refused to pay Wood anything. Wood found himself mired in
a seemingly endless round of federal suits and Congressional
lobbying.
Wood never got his money. And he lost his job to boot. He resigned
in 1869.
Wood's agents suffered, too. On May 12, 1869, the second Chief of
the Secret Service took over, and almost immediately fired most of
Wood's pioneer Secret Service agents: Operatives, Assistants and
Informants alike. The practice of receiving $25 per crook was
abolished. And the Secret Service began the long, uncertain process
of thorough professionalization.
Wood ended badly. He must have felt stabbed in the back. In fact his
entire organization was mangled.
On the other hand, William P. Wood was the first head of the Secret
Service. William Wood was the pioneer. People still honor his name.
Who remembers the name of the second head of the Secret Service?
As for William Brockway (also known as "Colonel Spencer"), he was
finally arrested by the Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in
prison, got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventyfour.
3.
Anyone with an interest in Operation Sundevil - or in American
computer-crime generally -- could scarcely miss the presence of Gail
Thackeray, Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona.
Computer-crime training manuals often cited Thackeray's group and
her work; she was the highest- ranking state official to specialize
in computer-related offenses. Her name had been on the Sundevil
press release (though modestly ranked well after the local federal
prosecuting attorney and the head of the Phoenix Secret Service
office). As public commentary, and controversy, began to mount about
the Hacker Crackdown, this Arizonan state official began to take a
higher and higher public profile. Though uttering almost nothing
specific about the Sundevil operation itself, she coined some of the
most striking soundbites of the growing propaganda war: "Agents are
operating in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for the
hacker community," was one. Another was the memorable "I am not a
mad dog prosecutor" (Houston Chronicle, Sept 2, 1990.) In the
meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual extreme
discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from the backlash of the
Steve Jackson scandal, had gone completely to earth.
As I collated my growing pile of newspaper clippings, Gail Thackeray
ranked as a comparative fount of public knowledge on police
operations.
I decided that I had to get to know Gail Thackeray. I wrote to her
at the Arizona Attorney General's Office.
Not only did she kindly reply to me, but, to my astonishment, she
knew very well what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.
Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job. And I temporarily
misplaced my own career as a science-fiction writer, to become a
full-time computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I flew to
Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray for my book on the
hacker crackdown.
4.
"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to get," says Gail
Thackeray. "Now they cost forty bucks -- and that's all just to
cover the costs from rip-off artists."
Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites. One by one they're not
much harm, no big deal. But they never come just one by one. They
come in swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole subcultures. And
they bite. Every time we buy a credit card today, we lose a little
financial vitality to a particular species of bloodsucker. What, in
her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, I ask,
consulting my notes. Is it -credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM
bank machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer intrusions? Software
viruses? Access-code theft? Records tampering? Software piracy?
Pornographic bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable
service? It's a long list. By the time I reach the end of it I feel
rather depressed. "Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward over
the table, her whole body gone stiff with energetic indignation,
"the biggest damage is telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake
charities. Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the
national debt with what these guys steal.... They target old people,
they get hold of credit ratings and demographics, they rip off the
old and the weak." The words come tumbling out of her.
It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. Grifters,
conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for
decades. This is where the word "phony" came from!
It's just that it's so much easier now, horribly facilitated by
advances in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern
phone system. The same professional fraudsters do it over and over,
Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense onion-shells of fake
companies.... fake holding corporations nine or ten layers deep,
registered all over the map. They get a phone installed under a
false name in an empty safe-house. And then they call-forward
everything out of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that may
even be in another state. And they don't even pay the charges on
their phones; after a month or so, they just split. Set up somewhere
else in another Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran
phone-crooks. They buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap
them on the PC, have a program pick out people over sixty-five who
pay a lot to charities. A whole subculture living off this,
merciless folks on the con.
"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people," Thackeray muses, with a
special loathing. "There's just no end to them."
We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, Arizona. It's a tough
town, Phoenix. A state capital seeing some hard times. Even to a
Texan like myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque. There
was, and remains, endless trouble over the Martin Luther King
holiday, the sort of stiff-necked, foot-shooting incident for which
Arizona politics seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the eccentric
Republican millionaire governor who was impeached, after reducing
state government to a ludicrous shambles. Then there was the
national Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and loans, in
which both of Arizona's U.S. senators, DeConcini and McCain, played
sadly prominent roles.
And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, in which state
legislators were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant
of the Phoenix city police department, who was posing as a Vegas
mobster.
"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people are amateurs here,
they thought they were finally getting to play with the big boys.
They don't have the least idea how to take a bribe! It's not
institutional corruption. It's not like back in Philly."
Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia. Now she's a
former assistant attorney general of the State of Arizona. Since
moving to Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of Steve
Twist, her boss in the Attorney General's office. Steve Twist wrote
Arizona's pioneering computer crime laws and naturally took an
interest in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and
Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit won a national
reputation for ambition and technical knowledgeability.... Until the
latest election in Arizona. Thackeray's boss ran for the top job,
and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General, apparently went to
some pains to eliminate the bureaucratic traces of his rival,
including his pet group -- Thackeray's group. Twelve people got
their walking papers.
Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled computer lab sits gathering
dust somewhere in the glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on
1275 Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her painstakingly
garnered back issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her
own expense -- are piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is
simply not particularly interested in electronic racketeering at the
moment.
At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, officially
unemployed, is working out of the county sheriff's office, living on
her savings, and prosecuting several cases -- working 60-hour weeks,
just as always -- for no pay at all. "I'm trying to train people,"
she mutters.
Half her life seems to be spent training people - merely pointing
out, to the naive and incredulous (such as myself) that this stuff
is actually going on out there. It's a small world, computer crime.
A young world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde BabyBoomer who favors
Grand Canyon white-water rafting to kill some slow time, is one of
the world's most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers." Her mentor
was Donn Parker, the California think-tank theorist who got it all
started 'way back in the mid70s, the "grandfather of the field,"
"the great bald eagle of computer crime."
And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray teaches. Endlessly.
Tirelessly. To anybody. To Secret Service agents and state police,
at the Glynco, Georgia federal training center. To local police, on
"roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook. To corporate
security personnel. To journalists. To parents.
Even crooks look to Gail Thackeray for advice. Phone-phreaks call
her at the office. They know very well who she is. They pump her for
information on what the cops are up to, how much they know.
Sometimes whole crowds of phone phreaks, hanging out on illegal
conference calls, will call Gail Thackeray up. They taunt her. And,
as always, they boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks,
simply cannot shut up. They natter on for hours.
Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the intricacies of
ripping-off phones; it's about as interesting as listening to hot-
rodders talk about suspension and distributor-caps. They also gossip
cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail Thackeray, they
incriminate themselves. "I have tapes," Thackeray says coolly.
Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "Dial-Tone" out in Alabama has
been known to spend half-an- hour simply reading stolen phone-codes
aloud into voice-mail answering machines. Hundreds, thousands of
numbers, recited in a monotone, without a break -- an eerie
phenomenon. When arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't
inform at endless length on everybody he knows.
Hackers are no better. What other group of criminals, she asks
rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions? She seems
deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to
an outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers
should be considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have
magazines, and they trespass a lot. Hot rod people have magazines
and they break speed limits and sometimes kill people....
I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking
and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so
that nobody ever did it again. She seems surprised. "No," she says
swiftly. "Maybe a little... in the old days... the MIT stuff... But
there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with computers
now, you don't have to break into somebody else's just to learn. You
don't have that excuse. You can learn all you like." Did you ever
hack into a system? I ask.
The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to demonstrate system
vulnerabilities. She's cool to the notion. Genuinely indifferent.
"What kind of computer do you have?"
"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.
"What kind do you wish you had?"
At this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in
Gail Thackeray's eyes. She becomes tense, animated, the words pour
out: "An Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation! The most
common hacker machines are Amigas and Commodores. And Apples." If
she had the Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of
seized computer-evidence disks on one convenient multifunctional
machine. A cheap one, too. Not like the old Attorney General lab,
where they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted Amiga flavors and
Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all the utility software... but no
Commodores. The workstations down at the Attorney General's are Wang
dedicated word-processors. Lame machines tied in to an office net -
- though at least they get online to the Lexis and Westlaw legal
data services. I don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome,
though. This computer-fever has been running through segments of our
society for years now. It's a strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-
hunger; but it's a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as
conversation spirals into the deepest and most deviant recesses of
software releases and expensive peripherals.... The mark of the
hacker beast. I have it too. The whole "electronic community,"
whatever the hell that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail
Thackeray is a hacker cop. My immediate reaction is a strong rush of
indignant pity: why doesn't somebody buy this woman her Amiga?! It's
not like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer mainframe; an
Amiga's a sweet little cookie-box thing. We're losing zillions in
organized fraud; prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in
court can cost a hundred grand easy. How come nobody can come up
with four lousy grand so this woman can do her job? For a hundred
grand we could buy every computer cop in America an Amiga. There
aren't that many of 'em.
Computers. The lust, the hunger, for computers. The loyalty they
inspire, the intense sense of possessiveness. The culture they have
bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix, Arizona because it
suddenly occurred to me that the police might -- just might -- come
and take away my computer. The prospect of this, the mere implied
threat, was unbearable. It literally changed my life. It was
changing the lives of many others. Eventually it would change
everybody's life.
Gail Thackeray was one of the top computercrime people in America.
And I was just some novelist, and yet I had a better computer than
hers. Practically everybody I knew had a better computer than Gail
Thackeray and her feeble laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff
in to clean up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut from
an old rubber tire.
But then again, you don't need a howitzer to enforce the law. You
can do a lot just with a badge. With a badge alone, you can
basically wreak havoc, take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers.
Ninety percent of "computer crime investigation" is just "crime
investigation:" names, places, dossiers, modus operandi, search
warrants, victims, complainants, informants...
What will computer crime look like in ten years? Will it get better?
Did "Sundevil" send 'em reeling back in confusion?
It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me with perfect
conviction. Still there in the background, ticking along, changing
with the times: the criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are.
Like our problems with alcohol. All the cops and laws in the world
never solved our problems with alcohol. If there's something people
want, a certain percentage of them are just going to take it.
Fifteen percent of the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent
will steal most anything not nailed down. The battle is for the
hearts and minds of the remaining seventy percent.
And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too steep a learning
curve" -- if it doesn't require a baffling amount of expertise and
practice -- then criminals are often some of the first through the
gate of a new technology. Especially if it helps them to hide. They
have tons of cash, criminals. The new communications tech -- like
pagers, cellular phones, faxes, Federal Express -- were pioneered by
rich corporate people, and by criminals. In the early years of
pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so enthralled this technology
that owing a beeper was practically prima facie evidence of cocaine
dealing. CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and breaking
the highway law became a national pastime. Dope dealers send cash by
Federal Express, despite, or perhaps because of, the warnings in
FedEx offices that tell you never to try this. Fed Ex uses X-rays
and dogs on their mail, to stop drug shipments. That doesn't work
very well.
Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones. There are simple
methods of faking ID on cellular phones, making the location of the
call mobile, free of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now
victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast toll-lists of
calls to Colombia and Pakistan.
Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law
enforcement nuts. Four thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud
skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world available with a phone
and a credit card number. Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new
neat rotten things to do."
Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law
enforcement nuts. Four thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud
skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world available with a phone
and a credit card number. Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new
neat rotten things to do."
If there were one thing Thackeray would like to have, it would be an
effective legal end-run through this new fragmentation minefield.
It would be a new form of electronic search warrant, an "electronic
letter of marque" to be issued by a judge. It would create a new
category of "electronic emergency." Like a wiretap, its use would be
rare, but it would cut across state lines and force swift
cooperation from all concerned. Cellular, phone, laser, computer
network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs,
packet radio. Some document, some mighty court-order, that could
slice through four thousand separate forms of corporate red-tape,
and get her at once to the source of calls, the source of email
threats and viruses, the sources of bomb threats, kidnapping
threats. "From now on," she says, "the Lindberg baby will always
die."
Something that would make the Net sit still, if only for a moment.
Something that would get her up to speed. Seven league boots. That's
what she really needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm on
the Pony Express." And then, too, there's the coming international
angle. Electronic crime has never been easy to localize, to tie to a
physical jurisdiction. And phone phreaks and hackers loathe
boundaries, they jump them whenever they can. The English. The
Dutch. And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos Computer
Club. The Australians. They've all learned phone-phreaking from
America. It's a growth mischief industry. The multinational networks
are global, but governments and the police simply aren't. Neither
are the laws. Or the legal frameworks for citizen protection.
One language is global, though - English. Phone phreaks speak
English; it's their native tongue even if they're Germans. English
may have started in England but now it's the Net language; it might
as well be called "CNNese."
Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. They're the world
masters at organized software piracy. The French aren't into phone-
phreaking either. The French are into computerized industrial
espionage.
In the old days of the MIT righteous hackerdom, crashing systems
didn't hurt anybody. Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now
the players are more venal. Now the consequences are worse. Hacking
will begin killing people soon. Already there are methods of
stacking calls onto 911 systems, annoying the police, and possibly
causing the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine
emergency. Hackers in Amtrak computers, or airtraffic control
computers, will kill somebody someday. Maybe a lot of people. Gail
Thackeray expects it.
And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud" virus is the latest
one out. It wipes hard-disks.
According to Thackeray, the idea that phonephreaks are Robin Hoods
is a fraud. They don't deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on
the weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome ANI (Automatic
Number Identification) trace capability. When AT&T wised up and
tightened security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby
Bells. The Baby Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so the phreaks
switched to smaller long-distance entrepreneurs. Today, they are
moving into locally owned PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are
full of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack. These victims
aren't the moneybags Sheriff of Nottingham or Bad King John, but
small groups of innocent people who find it hard to protect
themselves, and who really suffer from these depredations. Phone
phreaks pick on the weak. They do it for power. If it were legal,
they wouldn't do it. They don't want service, or knowledge, they
want the thrill of powertripping. There's plenty of knowledge or
service around, if you're willing to pay. Phone phreaks don't pay,
they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels like power,
that it gratifies their vanity.
I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office
building - a vast International Style office building downtown. The
Sheriff's office is renting part of it. I get the vague impression
that quite a lot of the building is empty - real estate crash. In a
Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown mall, I meet the "Sun
Devil" himself. He is the cartoon mascot of Arizona State
University, whose football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local
Secret Service HQ - hence the name Operation Sundevil. The Sun Devil
himself is named "Sparky." Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon and bright
yellow, the school colors. Sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow
pitchfork. He has a small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail, and
is dashing forward jabbing the air with the pitchfork, with an
expression of devilish glee.
Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil. The Legion of Doom ran a
hacker bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project." An Australian
hacker named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the Internet to attack
Cliff Stoll, then bragged and boasted about it to The New York
Times. This net of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.
The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Thackeray's
former workplace, is on 1275 Washington Avenue. Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents:
Washington, Jefferson, Madison...
After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs. Washington,
Jefferson and Madison - what would be the Phoenix inner city, if
there were an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town -
become the haunts of transients and derelicts. The homeless. The
sidewalks along Washington are lined with orange trees. Ripe fallen
fruit lies scattered like croquet balls on the sidewalks and
gutters. No one seems to be eating them. I try a fresh one. It
tastes unbearably bitter.
The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the Babbitt
administration, is a long low two story building of white cement and
wall-sized sheets of curtain-glass. Behind each glass wall is a
lawyer's office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by.
Across the street is a dour government building labelled simply
ECONOMIC SECURITY, something that has not been in great supply in
the American Southwest lately.
The offices are about twelve feet square. They feature tall wooden
cases full of red-spined lawbooks; Wang computer monitors;
telephones; Post-it notes galore. Also framed law diplomas and a
general excess of bad Western landscape art. Ansel Adams photos are
a big favorite, perhaps to compensate for the dismal specter of the
parking lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which features
gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel cacti.
It has grown dark. Gail Thackeray has told me that the people who
work late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot. It seems
cruelly ironic that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across the
interstate labyrinth of Cyberspace should fear an assault by a
homeless derelict in the parking lot of her own workplace.
Perhaps this is less than coincidence. Perhaps these two seemingly
disparate worlds are somehow generating one another. The poor and
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich and computer-
equipped, safe in their bedrooms, chatter over their modems. Quite
often the derelicts kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers'
offices, if they see something they need or want badly enough. I
cross the parking lot to the street behind the Attorney General's
office. A pair of young tramps are bedding down on flattened sheets
of cardboard, under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. One
tramp wears a glitter-covered T-shirt reading "CALIFORNIA" in Coca-
Cola cursive. His nose and cheeks look chafed and swollen; they
glisten with what seems to be Vaseline. The other tramp has a ragged
long-sleeved shirt and lank brown hair parted in the middle. They
both wear blue jeans coated in grime. They are both drunk. "You guys
crash here a lot?" I ask them.
They look at me warily. I am wearing black jeans, a black pinstriped
suit jacket and a black silk tie. I have odd shoes and a funny
haircut.
"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed tramp unconvincingly.
There is a lot of cardboard stacked here. More than any two people
could use.
"We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the street," says the brown-
haired tramp, puffing a Marlboro with a meditative air, as he
sprawls with his head on a blue nylon backpack. "The Saint
Vincent's." "You know who works in that building over there?" I ask,
pointing. The brown-haired tramp shrugs. "Some kind of attorneys, it
says."
We urge one another to take it easy. I give them five bucks. A block
down the street I meet a vigorous workman who is wheeling along some
kind of industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of
propane on it.
We make eye contact. We nod politely. I walk past him. "Hey! Excuse
me sir!" he says.
"Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.
"Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black guy, about 6'7",
scars on both his cheeks like this -" he gestures - "wears a black
baseball cap on backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"
"Sounds like I don't much want to meet him," I say.
"He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance. "Took it this
morning. Y'know, some people would be scared of a guy like that. But
I'm not scared. I'm from Chicago. I'm gonna hunt him down. We do
things like that in Chicago."
"Yeah?"
"I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out on his ass," he says
with satisfaction. "You run into him, you let me know." "Okay," I
say. "What is your name, sir?"
"Stanley..."
"And how can I reach you?"
"Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you don't have to
reach, uh, me. You can just call the cops. Go straight to the cops."
He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard.
"See, here's my report on him."
I look. The "report," the size of an index card, is labelled PRO-
ACT: Phoenix Residents Opposing Active Crime Threat... or is it
Organized Against Crime Threat? In the darkening street it's hard to
read. Some kind of vigilante group? Neighborhood watch? I feel very
puzzled.
"Are you a police officer, sir?"
He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.
"No," he says.
"But you are a `Phoenix Resident?"'
"Would you believe a homeless person," Stanley says.
"Really? But what's with the..." For the first time I take a close
look at Stanley's trolley. It's a rubber-wheeled thing of industrial
metal, but the device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in
fact a water-cooler. Stanley also has an Army duffel-bag, stuffed
tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a tent, and, at the base
of his trolley, a cardboard box and a battered leather briefcase.
"I see," I say, quite at a loss. For the first time I notice that
Stanley has a wallet. He has not lost his wallet at all. It is in
his back pocket and chained to his belt. It's not a new wallet. It
seems to have seen a lot of wear.
"Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley. Now that I know
that he is homeless - a possible threat - my entire perception of
him has changed in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just
bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a dangerous tang of
mania. "I have to do this!" he assures me. "Track this guy down...
It's a thing I do... you know... to keep myself together!" He
smiles, nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber handgrips.
"Gotta work together, y'know," Stanley booms, his face alight with
cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!"
The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only
computer illiterates in this book. To regard them as irrelevant,
however, would be a grave mistake.
As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is
subjected to wave after wave of future shock. But, as a necessary
converse, the "computer community" itself is subjected to wave after
wave of incoming computer illiterates. How will those currently
enjoying America's digital bounty regard, and treat, all this
teeming refuse yearning to breathe free? Will the electronic
frontier be another Land of Opportunity - or an armed and monitored
enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the
locked doors of our houses of justice?
Some people just don't get along with computers. They can't read.
They can't type. They just don't have it in their heads to master
arcane instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere, the process of
computerization of the populace will reach a limit. Some people -
quite decent people maybe, who might have thrived in any other
situation - will be left irretrievably outside the bounds. What's to
be done with these people, in the bright new shiny electroworld? How
will they be regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of cyberspace?
With contempt? Indifference? Fear?
In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor Stanley
became a perceived threat. Surprise and fear are closely allied
feelings. And the world of computing is full of surprises.
I met one character in the streets of Phoenix whose role in those
book is supremely and directly relevant. That personage was
Stanley's giant thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is
everywhere in this book. He is the specter haunting cyberspace.
Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for
no sane reason at all. Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly
programming his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights.
Sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat, covertly conspiring to register
all modems in the service of an Orwellian surveillance regime.
Mostly, though, this fearsome phantom is a "hacker." He's strange,
he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't smell right, he's
not keeping his proper place, he's not one of us. The focus of fear
is the hacker, for much the same reasons that Stanley's fancied
assailant is black.
Stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist. Despite
singleminded and tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued,
jailed, or fired. The only constructive way to do anything about him
is to learn more about Stanley himself. This learning process may be
repellent, it may be ugly, it may involve grave elements of
paranoiac confusion, but it's necessary. Knowing Stanley requires
something more than class-crossing condescension. It requires more
than steely legal objectivity. It requires human compassion and
sympathy. To know Stanley is to know his demon. If you know the
other guy's demon, then maybe you'll come to know some of your own.
You'll be able to separate reality from illusion. And then you won't
do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good. Like poor damned
Stanley from Chicago did.
5.
The Federal Computer Investigations Committee (FCIC) is the most
important and influential organization in the realm of American
computer-crime. Since the police of other countries have largely
taken their computer-crime cues from American methods, the FCIC
might well be called the most important computer crime group in the
world.
It is also, by federal standards, an organization of great
unorthodoxy. State and local investigators mix with federal agents.
Lawyers, financial auditors and computer-security programmers trade
notes with street cops. Industry vendors and telco security people
show up to explain their gadgetry and plead for protection and
justice. Private investigators, think-tank experts and industry
pundits throw in their two cents' worth. The FCIC is the antithesis
of a formal bureaucracy. Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of
this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant, but are entirely
convinced that this, for them, outright *weird* behavior is
nevertheless *absolutely necessary* to get their jobs done.
FCIC regulars -- from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS, the
Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police,
the Air Force, from military intelligence -- often attend meetings,
held hither and thither across the country, at their own expense.
The FCIC doesn't get grants. It doesn't charge membership fees. It
doesn't have a boss. It has no headquarters -- just a mail drop in
Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret Service. It
doesn't have a budget. It doesn't have schedules. It meets three
times a year -- sort of. Sometimes it issues publications, but the
FCIC has no regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary.
There are no minutes of FCIC meetings. Non-federal people are
considered "non-voting members," but there's not much in the way of
elections. There are no badges, lapel pins or certificates of
membership. Everyone is on a firstname basis. There are about forty
of them. Nobody knows how many, exactly. People come, people go -
sometimes people "go" formally but still hang around anyway. Nobody
has ever exactly figured out what "membership" of this "Committee"
actually entails.
Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social
world of computing, the "organization" of the FCIC is very
recognizable.
For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated
that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy
rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is topdown and
centrally controlled. Highly trained "employees" would take on much
greater autonomy, being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving
from place to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity.
"Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of people spontaneously
knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem
at hand, applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then
vanishing whence they came.
This is more or less what has actually happened in the world of
federal computer investigation. With the conspicuous exception of
the phone companies, which are after all over a hundred years old,
practically *every* organization that plays any important role in
this book functions just like the FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the
Arizona Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack crowd, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they *all* look and act like
"tiger teams" or "user's groups." They are all electronic ad-
hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need.
Some are police. Some are, by strict definition, criminals. Some are
political interest-groups. But every single group has that same
quality of apparent spontaneity -- "Hey, gang! My uncle's got a barn
-let's put on a show!"
Every one of these groups is embarrassed by this "amateurism," and,
for the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer
people, they all attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive
as possible. These electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of
nineteenth-century pioneers hankering after the respectability of
statehood. There are however, two crucial differences in the
historical experience of these "pioneers" of the nineteeth and
twenty-first centuries.
First, powerful information technology *does* play into the hands of
small, fluid, loosely organized groups. There have always been
"pioneers," "hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers,"
"movements," "users' groups" and "blue-ribbon panels of experts"
around. But a group of this kind - when technically equipped to ship
huge amounts of specialized information, at lightning speed, to its
members, to government, and to the press -- is simply a different
kind of animal. It's like the difference between an eel and an
electric eel.
The second crucial change is that American society is currently in a
state approaching permanent technological revolution. In the world
of computers particularly, it is practically impossible to *ever*
stop being a "pioneer," unless you either drop dead or deliberately
jump off the bus. The scene has never slowed down enough to become
well-institutionalized. And after twenty, thirty, forty years the
"computer revolution" continues to spread, to permeate new corners
of society. Anything that really works is already obsolete.
If you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word
"pioneer" begins to lose its meaning. Your way of life looks less
and less like an introduction to "something else" more stable and
organized, and more and more like *just the way things are.* A
"permanent revolution" is really a contradiction in terms. If
"turmoil" lasts long enough, it simply becomes *a new kind of
society* -still the same game of history, but new players, new
rules. Apply this to the world of late twentieth-century law
enforcement, and the implications are novel and puzzling indeed. Any
bureaucratic rulebook you write about computer-crime will be flawed
when you write it, and almost an antique by the time it sees print.
The fluidity and fast reactions of the FCIC give them a great
advantage in this regard, which explains their success. Even with
the best will in the world (which it does not, in fact, possess) it
is impossible for an organization the size of the U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation to get up to speed on the theory and
practice of computer crime. If they tried to train all their agents
to do this, it would be *suicidal,* as they would *never be able to
do anything else.*
The FBI does try to train its agents in the basics of electronic
crime, at their base in Quantico, Virginia. And the Secret Service,
along with many other law enforcement groups, runs quite successful
and well-attended training courses on wire fraud, business crime,
and computer intrusion at the Federal Law Enforcement Training
Center (FLETC, pronounced "fletsy") in Glynco, Georgia. But the best
efforts of these bureaucracies does not remove the absolute need for
a "cutting-edge mess" like the FCIC.
For you see -- the members of FCIC *are* the trainers of the rest of
law enforcement. Practically and literally speaking, they are the
Glynco computer- crime faculty by another name. If the FCIC went
over a cliff on a bus, the U.S. law enforcement community would be
rendered deaf dumb and blind in the world of computer crime, and
would swiftly feel a desperate need to reinvent them. And this is no
time to go starting from scratch.
On June 11, 1991, I once again arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, for the
latest meeting of the Federal Computer Investigations Committee.
This was more or less the twentieth meeting of this stellar group.
The count was uncertain, since nobody could figure out whether to
include the meetings of "the Colluquy," which is what the FCIC was
called in the mid-1980s before it had even managed to obtain the
dignity of its own acronym.
Since my last visit to Arizona, in May, the local AzScam bribery
scandal had resolved itself in a general muddle of humiliation. The
Phoenix chief of police, whose agents had videotaped nine state
legislators up to no good, had resigned his office in a tussle with
the Phoenix city council over the propriety of his undercover
operations.
The Phoenix Chief could now join Gail Thackeray and eleven of her
closest associates in the shared experience of politically motivated
unemployment. As of June, resignations were still continuing at the
Arizona Attorney General's office, which could be interpreted as
either a New Broom Sweeping Clean or a Night of the Long Knives Part
II, depending on your point of view.
The meeting of FCIC was held at the Scottsdale Hilton Resort.
Scottsdale is a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, known as "Scottsdull" to
scoffing local trendies, but well-equipped with posh shoppingmalls
and manicured lawns, while conspicuously undersupplied with homeless
derelicts. The Scottsdale Hilton Resort was a sprawling hotel in
postmodern crypto-Southwestern style. It featured a "mission bell
tower" plated in turquoise tile and vaguely resembling a Saudi
minaret.
Inside it was all barbarically striped Santa Fe Style decor. There
was a health spa downstairs and a large oddly-shaped pool in the
patio. A poolside umbrella-stand offered Ben and Jerry's politically
correct Peace Pops.
I registered as a member of FCIC, attaining a handy discount rate,
then went in search of the Feds. Sure enough, at the back of the
hotel grounds came the unmistakable sound of Gail Thackeray holding
forth.
Since I had also attended the Computers Freedom and Privacy
conference (about which more later), this was the second time I had
seen Thackeray in a group of her law enforcement colleagues. Once
again I was struck by how simply pleased they seemed to see her. It
was natural that she'd get *some* attention, as Gail was one of two
women in a group of some thirty men; but there was a lot more to it
than that.
Gail Thackeray personifies the social glue of the FCIC. They could
give a damn about her losing her job with the Attorney General. They
were sorry about it, of course, but hell, they'd all lost jobs. If
they were the kind of guys who liked steady boring jobs, they would
never have gotten into computer work in the first place.
I wandered into her circle and was immediately introduced to five
strangers. The conditions of my visit at FCIC were reviewed. I would
not quote anyone directly. I would not tie opinions expressed to the
agencies of the attendees. I would not (a purely hypothetical
example) report the conversation of a guy from the Secret Service
talking quite civilly to a guy from the FBI, as these two agencies
*never* talk to each other, and the IRS (also present, also
hypothetical) *never talks to anybody.*
Worse yet, I was forbidden to attend the first conference. And I
didn't. I have no idea what the FCIC was up to behind closed doors
that afternoon. I rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank
and thorough confession of their errors, goof-ups and blunders, as
this has been a feature of every FCIC meeting since their legendary
Memphis beer bust of 1986. Perhaps the single greatest attraction of
FCIC is that it is a place where you can go, let your hair down, and
completely level with people who actually comprehend what you are
talking about. Not only do they understand you, but they *really pay
attention,* they are *grateful for your insights,* and they *forgive
you,* which in nine cases out of ten is something even your boss
can't do, because as soon as you start talking "ROM," "BBS," or "T-
1 trunk," his eyes glaze over. I had nothing much to do that
afternoon. The FCIC were beavering away in their conference room.
Doors were firmly closed, windows too dark to peer through. I
wondered what a real hacker, a computer intruder, would do at a
meeting like this.
The answer came at once. He would "trash" the place. Not reduce the
place to trash in some orgy of vandalism; that's not the use of the
term in the hacker milieu. No, he would quietly *empty the trash
baskets* and silently raid any valuable data indiscreetly thrown
away.
Journalists have been known to do this. (Journalists hunting
information have been known to do almost every single unethical
thing that hackers have ever done. They also throw in a few awful
techniques all their own.) The legality of 'trashing' is somewhat
dubious but it is not in fact flagrantly illegal. It was, however,
absurd to contemplate trashing the FCIC. These people knew all about
trashing. I wouldn't last fifteen seconds.
The idea sounded interesting, though. I'd been hearing a lot about
the practice lately. On the spur of the moment, I decided I would
try trashing the office *across the hall* from the FCIC, an area
which had nothing to do with the investigators.
The office was tiny; six chairs, a table.... Nevertheless, it was
open, so I dug around in its plastic trash can.
To my utter astonishment, I came up with the torn scraps of a SPRINT
long-distance phone bill. More digging produced a bank statement and
the scraps of a hand-written letter, along with gum, cigarette
ashes, candy wrappers and a day-old-issue of USA TODAY.
The trash went back in its receptacle while the scraps of data went
into my travel bag. I detoured through the hotel souvenir shop for
some Scotch tape and went up to my room.
Coincidence or not, it was quite true. Some poor soul had, in fact,
thrown a SPRINT bill into the hotel's trash. Date May 1991, total
amount due: $252.36. Not a business phone, either, but a residential
bill, in the name of someone called Evelyn (not her real name).
Evelyn's records showed a ## PAST DUE BILL ##! Here was her nine-
digit account ID. Here was a stern computer-printed warning: "TREAT
YOUR FONCARD AS YOU WOULD ANY CREDIT CARD. TO SECURE AGAINST FRAUD,
NEVER GIVE YOUR FONCARD NUMBER OVER THE PHONE UNLESS YOU INITIATED
THE CALL. IF YOU RECEIVE SUSPICIOUS CALLS PLEASE NOTIFY CUSTOMER
SERVICE IMMEDIATELY!"
I examined my watch. Still plenty of time left for the FCIC to carry
on. I sorted out the scraps of Evelyn's SPRINT bill and re-assembled
them with fresh Scotch tape. Here was her ten-digit FONCARD number.
Didn't seem to have the ID number necessary to cause real fraud
trouble.
I did, however, have Evelyn's home phone number. And the phone
numbers for a whole crowd of Evelyn's long-distance friends and
acquaintances. In San Diego, Folsom, Redondo, Las Vegas, La Jolla,
Topeka, and Northampton Massachusetts. Even somebody in Australia!
I examined other documents. Here was a bank statement. It was
Evelyn's IRA account down at a bank in San Mateo California (total
balance $1877.20). Here was a charge-card bill for $382.64. She was
paying it off bit by bit.
Driven by motives that were completely unethical and prurient, I now
examined the handwritten notes. They had been torn fairly
thoroughly, so much so that it took me almost an entire five minutes
to reassemble them.
They were drafts of a love letter. They had been written on the
lined stationery of Evelyn's employer, a biomedical company.
Probably written at work when she should have been doing something
else.
"Dear Bob," (not his real name) "I guess in everyone's life there
comes a time when hard decisions have to be made, and this is a
difficult one for me -- very upsetting. Since you haven't called me,
and I don't understand why, I can only surmise it's because you
don't want to. I thought I would have heard from you Friday. I did
have a few unusual problems with my phone and possibly you tried, I
hope so.
"Robert, you asked me to 'let go'..."
The first note ended. *Unusual problems with her phone?* I looked
swiftly at the next note. "Bob, not hearing from you for the whole
weekend has left me very perplexed..."
Next draft. "Dear Bob, there is so much I don't understand right
now, and I wish I did. I wish I could talk to you, but for some
unknown reason you have elected not to call -- this is so difficult
for me to understand..."
She tried again.
"Bob, Since I have always held you in such high esteem, I had every
hope that we could remain good friends, but now one essential
ingredient is missing - respect. Your ability to discard people when
their purpose is served is appalling to me. The kindest thing you
could do for me now is to leave me alone. You are no longer welcome
in my heart or home..."
Try again.
"Bob, I wrote a very factual note to you to say how much respect I
had lost for you, by the way you treat people, me in particular, so
uncaring and cold. The kindest thing you can do for me is to leave
me alone entirely, as you are no longer welcome in my heart or home.
I would appreciate it if you could retire your debt to me as soon as
possible -- I wish no link to you in any way. Sincerely, Evelyn."
Good heavens, I thought, the bastard actually owes her money! I
turned to the next page.
"Bob: very simple. GOODBYE! No more mind games -- no more
fascination -- no more coldness -no more respect for you! It's over
-- Finis. Evie"
There were two versions of the final brushoff letter, but they read
about the same. Maybe she hadn't sent it. The final item in my
illicit and shameful booty was an envelope addressed to "Bob" at his
home address, but it had no stamp on it and it hadn't been mailed.
Maybe she'd just been blowing off steam because her rascal boyfriend
had neglected to call her one weekend. Big deal. Maybe they'd kissed
and made up, maybe she and Bob were down at Pop's Chocolate Shop
now, sharing a malted. Sure.
Easy to find out. All I had to do was call Evelyn up. With a half-
clever story and enough brass- plated gall I could probably trick
the truth out of her. Phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over
the phone all the time. It's called "social engineering." Social
engineering is a very common practice in the underground, and almost
magically effective. Human beings are almost always the weakest link
in computer security. The simplest way to learn Things You Are Not
Meant To Know is simply to call up and exploit the knowledgeable
people. With social engineering, you use the bits of specialized
knowledge you already have as a key, to manipulate people into
believing that you are legitimate. You can then coax, flatter, or
frighten them into revealing almost anything you want to know.
Deceiving people (especially over the phone) is easy and fun.
Exploiting their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel
very superior to them. If I'd been a malicious hacker on a trashing
raid, I would now have Evelyn very much in my power. Given all this
inside data, it wouldn't take much effort at all to invent a
convincing lie. If I were ruthless enough, and jaded enough, and
clever enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers -maybe committed
in tears, who knows -- could cause her a whole world of confusion
and grief.
I didn't even have to have a *malicious* motive. Maybe I'd be "on
her side," and call up Bob instead, and anonymously threaten to
break both his kneecaps if he didn't take Evelyn out for a steak
dinner pronto. It was still profoundly *none of my business.* To
have gotten this knowledge at all was a sordid act and to use it
would be to inflict a sordid injury.
To do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech
expertise. All it would take was the willingness to do it and a
certain amount of bent imagination. I went back downstairs. The
hard-working FCIC, who had labored forty-five minutes over their
schedule, were through for the day, and adjourned to the hotel bar.
We all had a beer.
I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather IACIS, the
International Association of Computer Investigation Specialists.
They're into "computer forensics," the techniques of picking
computersystems apart without destroying vital evidence. IACIS,
currently run out of Oregon, is comprised of investigators in the
U.S., Canada, Taiwan and Ireland. "Taiwan and Ireland?" I said. Are
*Taiwan* and *Ireland* really in the forefront of this stuff? Well
not exactly, my informant admitted. They just happen to have been
the first ones to have caught on by word of mouth. Still, the
international angle counts, because this is obviously an
international problem. Phone-lines go everywhere.
There was a Mountie here from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He
seemed to be having quite a good time. Nobody had flung this
Canadian out because he might pose a foreign security risk. These
are cyberspace cops. They still worry a lot about "jurisdictions,"
but mere geography is the least of their troubles. NASA had failed
to show. NASA suffers a lot from computer intrusions, in particular
from Australian raiders and a well-trumpeted Chaos Computer Club
case, and in 1990 there was a brief press flurry when it was
revealed that one of NASA's Houston branch-exchanges had been
systematically ripped off by a gang of phone-phreaks. But the NASA
guys had had their funding cut. They were stripping everything.
Air Force OSI, its Office of Special Investigations, is the *only*
federal entity dedicated full-time to computer security. They'd been
expected to show up in force, but some of them had cancelled -- a
Pentagon budget pinch.
As the empties piled up, the guys began joshing around and telling
war- stories. "These are cops," Thackeray said tolerantly. "If
they're not talking shop they talk about women and beer."
I heard the story about the guy who, asked for "a copy" of a
computer disk, *photocopied the label on it.* He put the floppy disk
onto the glass plate of a photocopier. The blast of static when the
copier worked completely erased all the real information on the
disk.
Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated diskettes
into the squad-car trunk next to the police radio. The powerful
radio signal blasted them, too. We heard a bit about Dave Geneson,
the first computer prosecutor, a mainframe-runner in Dade County,
turned lawyer. Dave Geneson was one guy who had hit the ground
running, a signal virtue in making the transition to computer-crime.
It was generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world of
computers first, then police or prosecutorial work. You could take
certain computer people and train 'em to successful police work -
- but of course they had to have the *cop mentality.* They had to
have street smarts. Patience. Persistence. And discretion. You've
got to make sure they're not hotshots, show-offs, "cowboys."
Most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in military
intelligence, or drugs, or homicide. It was rudely opined that
"military intelligence" was a contradiction in terms, while even the
grisly world of homicide was considered cleaner than drug
enforcement. One guy had been 'way undercover doing dope- work in
Europe for four years straight. "I'm almost recovered now," he said
deadpan, with the acid black humor that is pure cop. "Hey, now I can
say *fucker* without putting *mother* in front of it."
"In the cop world," another guy said earnestly, "everything is good
and bad, black and white. In the computer world everything is gray."
One guy -- a founder of the FCIC, who'd been with the group since it
was just the Colluquy -described his own introduction to the field.
He'd been a Washington DC homicide guy called in on a "hacker" case.
From the word "hacker," he naturally assumed he was on the trail of
a knife-wielding marauder, and went to the computer center expecting
blood and a body. When he finally figured out what was happening
there (after loudly demanding, in vain, that the programmers "speak
English"), he called headquarters and told them he was clueless
about computers. They told him nobody else knew diddly either, and
to get the hell back to work.
So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. By analogy. By
metaphor. "Somebody broke in to your computer, huh?" Breaking and
entering; I can understand that. How'd he get in? "Over the
phonelines." Harassing phone-calls, I can understand that! What we
need here is a tap and a trace!
It worked. It was better than nothing. And it worked a lot faster
when he got hold of another cop who'd done something similar. And
then the two of them got another, and another, and pretty soon the
Colluquy was a happening thing. It helped a lot that everybody
seemed to know Carlton Fitzpatrick, the data-processing trainer in
Glynco.
The ice broke big-time in Memphis in '86. The Colluquy had attracted
a bunch of new guys -- Secret Service, FBI, military, other feds,
heavy guys. Nobody wanted to tell anybody anything. They suspected
that if word got back to the home office they'd all be fired. They
passed an uncomfortably guarded afternoon.
The formalities got them nowhere. But after the formal session was
over, the organizers brought in a case of beer. As soon as the
participants knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and turf-
fighting, everything changed. "I bared my soul," one veteran
reminisced proudly. By nightfall they were building pyramids of
empty beer-cans and doing everything but composing a team fight
song.
FCIC were not the only computer-crime people around. There was DATTA
(District Attorneys' Technology Theft Association), though they
mostly specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and black-
market cases. There was HTCIA (High Tech Computer Investigators
Association), also out in Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and
featuring brilliant people like Donald Ingraham. There was LEETAC
(Law Enforcement Electronic Technology Assistance Committee) in
Florida, and computercrime units in Illinois and Maryland and Texas
and Ohio and Colorado and Pennsylvania. But these were local groups.
FCIC were the first to really network nationally and on a federal
level.
FCIC people live on the phone lines. Not on bulletin board systems -
- they know very well what boards are, and they know that boards
aren't secure. Everyone in the FCIC has a voice-phone bill like you
wouldn't believe. FCIC people have been tight with the telco people
for a long time. Telephone cyberspace is their native habitat.
FCIC has three basic sub-tribes: the trainers, the security people,
and the investigators. That's why it's called an "Investigations
Committee" with no mention of the term "computer-crime" -- the
dreaded "C-word." FCIC, officially, is "an association of agencies
rather than individuals;" unofficially, this field is small enough
that the influence of individuals and individual expertise is
paramount. Attendance is by invitation only, and most everyone in
FCIC considers himself a prophet without honor in his own house.
Again and again I heard this, with different terms but identical
sentiments. "I'd been sitting in the wilderness talking to myself."
"I was totally isolated." "I was desperate." "FCIC is the best thing
there is about computer crime in America." "FCIC is what really
works." "This is where you hear real people telling you what's
really happening out there, not just lawyers picking nits." "We
taught each other everything we knew."
The sincerity of these statements convinces me that this is true.
FCIC is the real thing and it is invaluable. It's also very sharply
at odds with the rest of the traditions and power structure in
American law enforcement. There probably hasn't been anything around
as loose and go-getting as the FCIC since the start of the U.S.
Secret Service in the 1860s. FCIC people are living like twenty-
firstcentury people in a twentieth-century environment, and while
there's a great deal to be said for that, there's also a great deal
to be said against it, and those against it happen to control the
budgets. I listened to two FCIC guys from Jersey compare life
histories. One of them had been a biker in a fairly heavy- duty gang
in the 1960s. "Oh, did you know so-and-so?" said the other guy from
Jersey. "Big guy, heavyset?"
"Yeah, I knew him."
"Yeah, he was one of ours. He was our plant in the gang."
"Really? Wow! Yeah, I knew him. Helluva guy."
Thackeray reminisced at length about being tear-gassed blind in the
November 1969 antiwar protests in Washington Circle, covering them
for her college paper. "Oh yeah, I was there," said another cop.
"Glad to hear that tear gas hit somethin'. Haw haw haw." He'd been
so blind himself, he confessed, that later that day he'd arrested a
small tree.
FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and necessity, and
turned into a new kind of cop. There are a lot of specialized cops
in the world -- your bunco guys, your drug guys, your tax guys, but
the only group that matches FCIC for sheer isolation are probably
the child-pornography people. Because they both deal with
conspirators who are desperate to exchange forbidden data and also
desperate to hide; and because nobody else in law enforcement even
wants to hear about it.
FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot. They tend not to get the
equipment and training they want and need. And they tend to get sued
quite often.
As the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the talk grew
darker. Nothing ever gets done in government, someone opined, until
there's a *disaster.* Computing disasters are awful, but there's no
denying that they greatly help the credibility of FCIC people. The
Internet Worm, for instance. "For years we'd been warning about that
-but it's nothing compared to what's coming." They expect horrors,
these people. They know that nothing will really get done until
there is a horror.
6.
Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who'd been a
computer cop, gotten into hot water with an Arizona city council,
and now installed computer networks for a living (at a considerable
rise in pay). He talked about pulling fiber-optic networks apart.
Even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a literal
"network" -- a bunch of machines all cabled together, generally with
a complexity that puts stereo units to shame. FCIC people invent and
publicize methods of seizing computers and maintaining their
evidence. Simple things, sometimes, but vital rules of thumb for
street cops, who nowadays often stumble across a busy computer in
the midst of a drug investigation or a white-collar bust. For
instance: Photograph the system before you touch it. Label the ends
of all the cables before you detach anything. "Park" the heads on
the disk drives before you move them. Get the diskettes. Don't put
the diskettes in magnetic fields. Don't write on diskettes with
ballpoint pens. Get the manuals. Get the printouts. Get the
handwritten notes. Copy data before you look at it, and then examine
the copy instead of the original. Now our lecturer distributed
copied diagrams of a typical LAN or "Local Area Network", which
happened to be out of Connecticut. *One hundred and fifty-nine*
desktop computers, each with its own peripherals. Three "file
servers." Five "star couplers" each with thirty-two ports. One
sixteenport coupler off in the corner office. All these machines
talking to each other, distributing electronic mail, distributing
software, distributing, quite possibly, criminal evidence. All
linked by highcapacity fiber- optic cable. A bad guy -- cops talk a
lot about "bad guys" -- might be lurking on PC #47 or #123 and
distributing his ill doings onto some dupe's "personal" machine in
another office -- or another floor -- or, quite possibly, two or
three miles away! Or, conceivably, the evidence might be "data-
striped" -- split up into meaningless slivers stored, one by one, on
a whole crowd of different disk drives.
The lecturer challenged us for solutions. I for one was utterly
clueless. As far as I could figure, the Cossacks were at the gate;
there were probably more disks in this single building than were
seized during the entirety of Operation Sundevil.
"Inside informant," somebody said. Right. There's always the human
angle, something easy to forget when contemplating the arcane
recesses of high technology. Cops are skilled at getting people to
talk, and computer people, given a chair and some sustained
attention, will talk about their computers till their throats go
raw. There's a case on record of a single question -- "How'd you do
it?" -eliciting a forty-five-minute videotaped confession from a
computer criminal who not only completely incriminated himself but
drew helpful diagrams.
Computer people talk. Hackers *brag.* Phonephreaks talk
*pathologically* -- why else are they stealing phone-codes, if not
to natter for ten hours straight to their friends on an opposite
seaboard? Computer-literate people do in fact possess an arsenal of
nifty gadgets and techniques that would allow them to conceal all
kinds of exotic skullduggery, and if they could only *shut up* about
it, they could probably get away with all manner of amazing
information-crimes. But that's just not how it works -- or at least,
that's not how it's worked *so far.*
Most every phone-phreak ever busted has swiftly implicated his
mentors, his disciples, and his friends. Most every white-collar
computer-criminal, smugly convinced that his clever scheme is
bulletproof, swiftly learns otherwise when, for the first time in
his life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over, grabs the front
of his shirt, looks him right in the eye and says: "All right,
*asshole* -- you and me are going downtown!" All the hardware in the
world will not insulate your nerves from these actual real-life
sensations of terror and guilt.
Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z without thumbing
through every letter in some smart-ass bad-guy's alphabet. Cops know
how to cut to the chase. Cops know a lot of things other people
don't know.
Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too. Hackers
know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the
phone-lines. But cops can show up *right on your doorstep* and carry
off *you* and your computer in separate steel boxes. A cop
interested in hackers can grab them and grill them. A hacker
interested in cops has to depend on hearsay, underground legends,
and what cops are willing to publicly reveal. And the Secret Service
didn't get named "the *Secret* Service" because they blab a lot.
Some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken
impression that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line. Well,
he announced, he and his son had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap
in his workshop at home. He passed it around the audience, along
with a circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if
we saw it on a case. We all had a look.
The tap was a classic "Goofy Prototype" -- a thumb-length rounded
metal cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it. From one end
dangled three thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black
plastic cap. When you plucked the safety-cap off the end of a cable,
you could see the glass fiber - no thicker than a pinhole.
Our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength
division multiplexer." Apparently, what one did was to cut the
fiber-optic cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete
the network again, and then read any passing data on the line by
hooking up the third leg to some kind of monitor. Sounded simple
enough. I wondered why nobody had thought of it before. I also
wondered whether this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage
friends.
We had a break. The guy sitting next to me was wearing a giveaway
baseball cap advertising the Uzi submachine gun. We had a desultory
chat about the merits of Uzis. Long a favorite of the Secret
Service, it seems Uzis went out of fashion with the advent of the
Persian Gulf War, our Arab allies taking some offense at Americans
toting Israeli weapons. Besides, I was informed by another expert,
Uzis jam. The equivalent weapon of choice today is the Heckler &
Koch, manufactured in Germany.
The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic photographer. He also did a
lot of photographic surveillance work in computer crime cases. He
used to, that is, until the firings in Phoenix. He was now a private
investigator and, with his wife, ran a photography salon
specializing in weddings and portrait photos. At - - one must repeat
-- a considerable rise in income. He was still FCIC. If you were
FCIC, and you needed to talk to an expert about forensic
photography, well, there he was, willing and able. If he hadn't
shown up, people would have missed him.
Our lecturer had raised the point that preliminary investigation of
a computer system is vital before any seizure is undertaken. It's
vital to understand how many machines are in there, what kinds there
are, what kind of operating system they use, how many people use
them, where the actual data itself is stored. To simply barge into
an office demanding "all the computers" is a recipe for swift
disaster.
This entails some discreet inquiries beforehand. In fact, what it
entails is basically undercover work. An intelligence operation.
*Spying,* not to put too fine a point on it.
In a chat after the lecture, I asked an attendee whether "trashing"
might work.
I received a swift briefing on the theory and practice of "trash
covers." Police "trash covers," like "mail covers" or like wiretaps,
require the agreement of a judge. This obtained, the "trashing" work
of cops is just like that of hackers, only more so and much better
organized. So much so, I was informed, that mobsters in Phoenix make
extensive use of locked garbage cans picked up by a specialty high-
security trash company.
In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had trashed a local
residence for four months. Every week they showed up on the
municipal garbage truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried the
contents of the suspect cans off to a shade tree, where they combed
through the garbage -- a messy task, especially considering that one
of the occupants was undergoing kidney dialysis. All useful
documents were cleaned, dried and examined. A discarded typewriter-
ribbon was an especially valuable source of data, as its long
onestrike ribbon of film contained the contents of every letter
mailed out of the house. The letters were neatly retyped by a police
secretary equipped with a large desk-mounted magnifying glass.
There is something weirdly disquieting about the whole subject of
"trashing" -- an unsuspected and indeed rather disgusting mode of
deep personal vulnerability. Things that we pass by every day, that
we take utterly for granted, can be exploited with so little work.
Once discovered, the knowledge of these vulnerabilities tend to
spread.
Take the lowly subject of *manhole covers.* The humble manhole cover
reproduces many of the dilemmas of computer-security in miniature.
Manhole covers are, of course, technological artifacts, access-
points to our buried urban infrastructure. To the vast majority of
us, manhole covers are invisible. They are also vulnerable. For many
years now, the Secret Service has made a point of caulking manhole
covers along all routes of the Presidential motorcade. This is, of
course, to deter terrorists from leaping out of underground ambush
or, more likely, planting remote-control carsmashing bombs beneath
the street.
Lately, manhole covers have seen more and more criminal
exploitation, especially in New York City. Recently, a telco in New
York City discovered that a cable television service had been
sneaking into telco manholes and installing cable service alongside
the phone-lines -- *without paying royalties.* New York companies
have also suffered a general plague of (a) underground copper cable
theft; (b) dumping of garbage, including toxic waste, and (c) hasty
dumping of murder victims.
Industry complaints reached the ears of an innovative New England
industrial-security company, and the result was a new product known
as "the Intimidator," a thick titanium-steel bolt with a precisely
machined head that requires a special device to unscrew. All these
"keys" have registered serial numbers kept on file with the
manufacturer. There are now some thousands of these "Intimidator"
bolts being sunk into American pavements wherever our President
passes, like some macabre parody of strewn roses. They are also
spreading as fast as steel dandelions around US military bases and
many centers of private industry.
Quite likely it has never occurred to you to peer under a manhole
cover, perhaps climb down and walk around down there with a
flashlight, just to see what it's like. Formally speaking, this
might be trespassing, but if you didn't hurt anything, and didn't
make an absolute habit of it, nobody would really care. The freedom
to sneak under manholes was likely a freedom you never intended to
exercise.
You now are rather less likely to have that freedom at all. You may
never even have missed it until you read about it here, but if
you're in New York City it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going.
This is one of the things that crime, and the reaction to crime,
does to us.
The tenor of the meeting now changed as the Electronic Frontier
Foundation arrived. The EFF, whose personnel and history will be
examined in detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil
liberties group who arose in direct response to the Hacker Crackdown
of 1990.
Now Mitchell Kapor, the Foundation's president, and Michael Godwin,
its chief attorney, were confronting federal law enforcement *mano a
mano* for the first time ever. Ever alert to the manifold uses of
publicity, Mitch Kapor and Mike Godwin had brought their own
journalist in tow: Robert Draper, from Austin, whose recent
wellreceived book about ROLLING STONE magazine was still on the
stands. Draper was on assignment for TEXAS MONTHLY.
The Steve Jackson/EFF civil lawsuit against the Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force was a matter of considerable regional
interest in Texas. There were now two Austinite journalists here on
the case. In fact, counting Godwin (a former Austinite and former
journalist) there were three of us. Lunch was like Old Home Week.
Later, I took Draper up to my hotel room. We had a long frank talk
about the case, networking earnestly like a miniature freelance-
journo version of the FCIC: privately confessing the numerous
blunders of journalists covering the story, and trying hard to
figure out who was who and what the hell was really going on out
there. I showed Draper everything I had dug out of the Hilton
trashcan. We pondered the ethics of "trashing" for a while, and
agreed that they were dismal. We also agreed that finding a SPRINT
bill on your first time out was a heck of a coincidence.
First I'd "trashed" -- and now, mere hours later, I'd bragged to
someone else. Having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now,
unsurprisingly, following its logic. Having discovered something
remarkable through a surreptitious action, I of course *had* to
"brag," and to drag the passing Draper into my iniquities. I felt I
needed a witness. Otherwise nobody would have believed what I'd
discovered....
Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively,
introduced Kapor and Godwin to her colleagues. Papers were
distributed. Kapor took center stage. The brilliant Bostonian high-
tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own administration and
quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and
frankly admitted as much. He began by saying he consided computer-
intrusion to be morally wrong, and that the EFF was not a "hacker
defense fund," despite what had appeared in print. Kapor chatted a
bit about the basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good
faith and willingness to listen and seek common ground with law
enforcement -- when, er, possible.
Then, at Godwin's urging, Kapor suddenly remarked that EFF's own
Internet machine had been "hacked" recently, and that EFF did not
consider this incident amusing.
After this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite
rapidly. Soon Kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections,
challenging definitions, and juggling paradigms with something akin
to his usual gusto.
Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical
analysis of the merits of telco "Caller-ID" services. (On this
topic, FCIC and EFF have never been at loggerheads, and have no
particular established earthworks to defend.) Caller-ID has
generally been promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a
presentation Kapor described as a "smokescreen," the real point of
Caller-ID being to *allow corporate customers to build extensive
commercial databases on everybody who phones or faxes them.*
Clearly, few people in the room had considered this possibility,
except perhaps for two late- arrivals from US WEST RBOC security,
who chuckled nervously.
Mike Godwin then made an extensive presentation on "Civil Liberties
Implications of Computer Searches and Seizures." Now, at last, we
were getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-
trading. The audience listened with close attention, angry mutters
rising occasionally: "He's trying to teach us our jobs!" "We've been
thinking about this for years! We think about these issues every
day!" "If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by the guy's
victims!" "I'm violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full
of illegal *pirated software* and *stolen codes!*" "It's our job to
make sure people don't trash the Constitution -- we're the
*defenders* of the Constitution!" "We seize stuff when we know it
will be forfeited anyway as restitution for the victim!"
"If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant, get a
forfeiture warrant," Godwin suggested coolly. He further remarked
that most suspects in computer crime don't *want* to see their
computers vanish out the door, headed God knew where, for who knows
how long. They might not mind a search, even an extensive search,
but they want their machines searched on-site. "Are they gonna feed
us?" somebody asked sourly. "How about if you take copies of the
data?" Godwin parried.
"That'll never stand up in court." "Okay, you make copies, give
*them* the copies, and take the originals."
Hmmm.
Godwin championed bulletin-board systems as repositories of First
Amendment protected free speech. He complained that federal
computercrime training manuals gave boards a bad press, suggesting
that they are hotbeds of crime haunted by pedophiles and crooks,
whereas the vast majority of the nation's thousands of boards are
completely innocuous, and nowhere near so romantically suspicious.
People who run boards violently resent it when their systems are
seized, and their dozens (or hundreds) of users look on in abject
horror. Their rights of free expression are cut short. Their right
to associate with other people is infringed. And their privacy is
violated as their private electronic mail becomes police property.
Not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of seizing boards. The
issue passed in chastened silence. Legal principles aside -- (and
those principles cannot be settled without laws passed or court
precedents) -- seizing bulletin boards has become public-relations
poison for American computer police.
And anyway, it's not entirely necessary. If you're a cop, you can
get 'most everything you need from a pirate board, just by using an
inside informant. Plenty of vigilantes -- well, *concerned citizens*
-will inform police the moment they see a pirate board hit their
area (and will tell the police all about it, in such technical
detail, actually, that you kinda wish they'd shut up). They will
happily supply police with extensive downloads or printouts. It's
*impossible* to keep this fluid electronic information out of the
hands of police. Some people in the electronic community become
enraged at the prospect of cops "monitoring" bulletin boards. This
does have touchy aspects, as Secret Service people in particular
examine bulletin boards with some regularity. But to expect
electronic police to be deaf dumb and blind in regard to this
particular medium rather flies in the face of common sense. Police
watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers and magazines;
why should the new medium of boards be different? Cops can exercise
the same access to electronic information as everybody else. As we
have seen, quite a few computer police maintain *their own* bulletin
boards, including anti-hacker "sting" boards, which have generally
proven quite effective.
As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in Canada (and colleagues
in Ireland and Taiwan) don't have First Amendment or American
constitutional restrictions, but they do have phone lines, and can
call any bulletin board in America whenever they please. The same
technological determinants that play into the hands of hackers,
phone phreaks and software pirates can play into the hands of
police. "Technological determinants" don't have *any* human
allegiances. They're not black or white, or Establishment or
Underground, or pro-or-anti anything.
Godwin complained at length about what he called "the Clever
Hobbyist hypothesis" -- the assumption that the "hacker" you're
busting is clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by
searched with extreme thoroughness. So: from the law's point of
view, why risk missing anything? Take the works. Take the guy's
computer. Take his books. Take his notebooks. Take the electronic
drafts of his love letters. Take his Walkman. Take his wife's
computer. Take his dad's computer. Take his kid sister's computer.
Take his employer's computer. Take his compact disks -- they *might*
be CD-ROM disks, cunningly disguised as pop music. Take his laser
printer -- he might have hidden something vital in the printer's
5meg of memory. Take his software manuals and hardware
documentation. Take his science-fiction novels and his
simulationgaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man
arcade game. Take his answering machine, take his telephone out of
the wall. Take anything remotely suspicious.
Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever
genius hobbyists. Quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have
much in the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb
rip-off techniques. The same goes for most fifteenyear-olds who've
downloaded a code-scanning program from a pirate board. There's no
real need to seize everything in sight. It doesn't require an entire
computer system and ten thousand disks to prove a case in court.
What if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime? someone
demanded.
Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the
instrumentality of a crime was pretty well established in the
American legal system. The meeting broke up. Godwin and Kapor had to
leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before the Massachusetts
Department Of Public Utility, about ISDN narrowband wide-area
networking.
As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed elated. She had taken a
great risk with this. Her colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor
and Godwin's heads off. She was very proud of them, and told them
so.
"Did you hear what Godwin said about *instrumentality of a crime?*"
she exulted, to nobody in particular. "Wow, that means *Mitch isn't
going to sue me."
7.
America's computer police are an interesting group. As a social
phenomenon they are far more interesting, and far more important,
than teenage phone phreaks and computer hackers. First, they're
older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky morals, but seasoned
adult professionals with all the responsibilities of public service.
And, unlike hackers, they possess not merely *technical* power
alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.
And, very interestingly, they are just as much at sea in cyberspace
as everyone else. They are not happy about this. Police are
authoritarian by nature, and prefer to obey rules and precedents.
(Even those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough territory
will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.) But in cyberspace
there *are* no rules and precedents. They are groundbreaking
pioneers, Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.
In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers, fascinated by
the ins and outs of computer security, and attracted by the lure of
specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do well to forget
all about "hacking" and set his (or her) sights on becoming a fed.
Feds can trump hackers at almost every single thing hackers do,
including gathering intelligence, undercover disguise, trashing,
phone-tapping, building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating
computer systems -*criminal* computer systems. Secret Service agents
know more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can
find out in years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software
bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot
confidential information that is only vague rumor in the
underground.
And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there are few
people in the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-
trained, well-armed United States Secret Service agent. Of course, a
few personal sacrifices are necessary in order to obtain that power
and knowledge. First, you'll have the galling discipline of
belonging to a large organization; but the world of computer crime
is still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will remain
spectacularly fluid for years to come. The second sacrifice is that
you'll have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great loss.
Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a
boon to your health.
A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man or
woman today. The field will almost certainly expand drastically in
years to come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you become a
professional, the pioneers you have read about in this book will be
the grand old men and women of the field, swamped by their many
disciples and successors. Of course, some of them, like William P.
Wood of the 1865 Secret Service, may well be mangled in the whirring
machinery of legal controversy; but by the time you enter the
computer-crime field, it may have stabilized somewhat, while
remaining entertainingly challenging.
But you can't just have a badge. You have to win it. First, there's
the federal law enforcement training. And it's hard -- it's a
challenge. A real challenge -- not for wimps and rodents.
Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling courses at the
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service
agents are periodically re-trained during their entire careers.) In
order to get a glimpse of what this might be like, I myself
travelled to FLETC.
8.
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-acre facility
on Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds,
damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats. Until
1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and still features a working runway,
and some WWII vintage blockhouses and officers' quarters. The Center
has since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but there's
still enough forest and swamp on the facility for the Border Patrol
to put in tracking practice.
As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists. The nearest real town is
Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17, where I stayed at the aptly
named Marshview Holiday Inn. I had Sunday dinner at a seafood
restaurant called "Jinright's," where I feasted on deep-fried
alligator tail. This local favorite was a heaped basket of bite-
sized chunks of white, tender, almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming
in a peppered batter crust. Alligator makes a culinary experience
that's hard to forget, especially when liberally basted with
homemade cocktail sauce from a Jinright squeeze-bottle.
The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local black folks in
their Sunday best, and white Georgian locals who all seemed to bear
an uncanny resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard. The 2,400
students from 75 federal agencies who make up the FLETC population
scarcely seem to make a dent in the low-key local scene. The
students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to have taken on
much of the relaxed air of the Deep South. My host was Mr. Carlton
Fitzpatrick, the Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud
Institute. Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, well-tanned
Alabama native somewhere near his late forties, with a fondness for
chewing tobacco, powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies.
We'd met before, at FCIC in Arizona.
The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine divisions at FLETC.
Besides Financial Fraud, there's Driver & Marine, Firearms, and
Physical Training. These are specialized pursuits. There are also
five general training divisions: Basic Training, Operations,
Enforcement Techniques, Legal Division, and Behavioral Science.
Somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to turn green
college graduates into federal agents. First they're given ID cards.
Then they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls known as
"smurf suits." The trainees are assigned a barracks and a cafeteria,
and immediately set on FLETC's bone- grinding physical training
routine. Besides the obligatory daily jogging -- (the trainers run
up danger flags beside the track when the humidity rises high enough
to threaten heat stroke) - there's the Nautilus machines, the
martial arts, the survival skills....
The eighteen federal agencies who maintain onsite academies at FLETC
employ a wide variety of specialized law enforcement units, some of
them rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal
Investigation Division, Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Customs,
Immigration, Secret Service and the Treasury's uniformed
subdivisions.... If you're a federal cop and you don't work for the
FBI, you train at FLETC. This includes people as apparently obscure
as the agents of the Railroad Retirement Board Inspector General. Or
the Tennessee Valley Authority Police, who are in fact federal
police officers, and can and do arrest criminals on the federal
property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
And then there are the computer-crime people. All sorts, all
backgrounds. Mr. Fitzpatrick is not jealous of his specialized
knowledge. Cops all over, in every branch of service, may feel a
need to learn what he can teach. Backgrounds don't matter much.
Fitzpatrick himself was originally a Border Patrol veteran, then
became a Border Patrol instructor at FLETC. His Spanish is still
fluent -- but he found himself strangely fascinated when the first
computers showed up at the Training Center. Fitzpatrick did have a
background in electrical engineering, and though he never considered
himself a computer hacker, he somehow found himself writing useful
little programs for this new and promising gizmo.
He began looking into the general subject of computers and crime,
reading Donn Parker's books and articles, keeping an ear cocked for
war stories, useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming
people of the local computer- crime and hightechnology units....
Soon he got a reputation around FLETC as the resident "computer
expert," and that reputation alone brought him more exposure, more
experience -- until one day he looked around, and sure enough he
*was* a federal computer-crime expert.
In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be *the* federal computer-
crime expert. There are plenty of very good computer people, and
plenty of very good federal investigators, but the area where these
worlds of expertise overlap is very slim. And Carlton Fitzpatrick
has been right at the center of that since 1985, the first year of
the Colluquy, a group which owes much to his influence.
He seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled office, with
its Ansel Adams-style Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior
Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase crammed with three-
ring binders with ominous titles such as *Datapro Reports on
Information Security* and *CFCA Telecom Security '90.*
The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at the door to
chat about new developments in locksmithing or to shake their heads
over the latest dismal developments in the BCCI global banking
scandal.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-stories,
related in an acerbic drawl. He tells me the colorful tale of a
hacker caught in California some years back. He'd been raiding
systems, typing code without a detectable break, for twenty, twenty-
four, thirty-six hours straight. Not just logged on -- *typing.*
Investigators were baffled. Nobody could do that. Didn't he have to
go to the bathroom? Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking
device that could actually type code?
A raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of astonishing
squalor. The hacker turned out to be a Pakistani computer-science
student who had flunked out of a California university. He'd gone
completely underground as an illegal electronic immigrant, and was
selling stolen phoneservice to stay alive. The place was not merely
messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder. Powered by
some weird mix of culture shock, computer addiction, and
amphetamines, the suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his
computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks and drugs at
hand on the edge of his desk and a chamber-pot under his chair.
Word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker
community.
Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the
FLETC grounds. One of our first sights is the biggest indoor firing
range in the world. There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick
assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety of automatic
weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s.... He's willing to take me inside. I
tell him I'm sure that's really interesting, but I'd rather see his
computers. Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and pleased.
I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever seen who has turned
down the shooting gallery in favor of microchips.
Our next stop is a favorite with touring Congressmen: the three-mile
long FLETC driving range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine
Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking
road-blocks, diplomatic security driving for VIP limousines.... A
favorite FLETC pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the
passenger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit a hundred miles
an hour, then take it right into "the skid-pan," a section of
greased track where two tons of Detroit iron can whip and spin like
a hockey puck.
Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're rifled again and again
for search practice. Then they do 25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit
training; they get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted
radials. Then it's off to the skid pan, where sometimes they roll
and tumble headlong in the grease. When they're sufficiently grease-
stained, dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock unit,
where they're battered without pity. And finally then they're
sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose
trainees learn the ins and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them
into smoking wreckage.
There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large
grounded boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for
searches. The plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next
to an eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-
terrorism specialists practice hostage rescues. As I gaze on this
creepy paragon of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are
jangled by a sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire,
somewhere in the woods to my right. "Ninemillimeter," Fitzpatrick
judges calmly.
Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared to the
truly surreal area known as "the raid-houses." This is a street
lined on both sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with flat
pebbled roofs. They were once officers' quarters. Now they are
training grounds. The first one to our left, Fitzpatrick tells me,
has been specially adapted for computer search-and-seizure practice.
Inside it has been wired for video from top to bottom, with eighteen
pan-and-tilt remotely controlled videocams mounted on walls and in
corners. Every movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by
teachers, for later taped analysis. Wasted movements, hesitations,
possibly lethal tactical mistakes -- all are gone over in detail.
Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front
door, scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated
impact, day after day, of federal shoe-leather.
Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are
practicing a murder. We drive by slowly as some very young and
rather nervouslooking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man
on the raid-house lawn. Dealing with murder takes a lot of practice;
first you have to learn to control your own instinctive disgust and
panic, then you have to learn to control the reactions of a
nerveshredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a
loved one, some of whom may be murderers -- quite possibly both at
once.
A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly
curious, and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local Georgians:
waitresses, musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can
learn a script. These people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year
after year, must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world.
Something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation,
standing around talking in bright Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully
pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies
inside on faked bloodstains.... While behind this weird masquerade,
like a nested set of Russian dolls, are grim future realities of
real death, real violence, real murders of real people, that these
young agents will really investigate, many times during their
careers.... Over and over.... Will those anticipated murders look
like this, feel like this -- not as "real" as these amateur actors
are trying to make it seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly
unreal, as watching fake people standing around on a fake lawn?
Something about this scene unhinges me. It seems nightmarish to me,
Kafkaesque. I simply don't know how to take it; my head is turned
around; I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.
When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I talk about
computers. For the first time cyberspace seems like quite a
comfortable place. It seems very real to me suddenly, a place where
I know what I'm talking about, a place I'm used to. It's real.
"Real." Whatever.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in cyberspace
circles who is happy with his present equipment. He's got a 5 Meg
RAM PC with a 112 meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a
Compaq 386 desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with 120 meg. Down the
hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A with a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud
modem with four com-lines. There's a training minicomputer, and a
10-meg local mini just for the Center, and a lab-full of student PC
clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so. There's a Data General MV 2500
with 8 meg on board and a 370 meg disk.
Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the Data General when he's
finished beta-testing the software for it, which he wrote himself.
It'll have E- mail features, massive files on all manner of
computer-crime and investigation procedures, and will follow the
computer-security specifics of the Department of Defense "Orange
Book." He thinks it will be the biggest BBS in the federal
government. Will it have *Phrack* on it? I ask wryly.
Sure, he tells me. *Phrack,* *TAP,* *Computer Underground Digest,*
all that stuff. With proper disclaimers, of course.
I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a system that size is
very time-consuming, and Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses
every day.
No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its money worth out of the
instructors. He thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a
high-school student. He says a bit more, something I think about an
Eagle Scout law-enforcement liaison program, but my mind has
rocketed off in disbelief.
"You're going to put a *teenager* in charge of a federal security
BBS?" I'm speechless. It hasn't escaped my notice that the FLETC
Financial Fraud Institute is the *ultimate* hacker-trashing target;
there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and consummate cool by
every standard of the digital underground.... I imagine the hackers
of my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden- knowledge
greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking the superultra top-
secret computers used to train the Secret Service in computer-
crime....
"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really nice kid and all,
but that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's,
you know, into computers and just starting out..."
"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the first time I begin
to suspect that he's pulling my leg.
He seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called JICC,
Joint Intelligence Control Council. It's based on the services
provided by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which supplies
data and intelligence to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the
Customs Service, the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four
southern border states. Certain EPIC files can now be accessed by
drug-enforcement police of Central America, South America and the
Caribbean, who can also trade information among themselves. Using a
telecom program called "White Hat," written by two brothers named
Lopez from the Dominican Republic, police can now network
internationally on inexpensive PCs. Carlton Fitzpatrick is teaching
a class of drug-war agents from the Third World, and he's very proud
of their progress. Perhaps soon the sophisticated smuggling networks
of the Medellin Cartel will be matched by a sophisticated computer
network of the Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies. They'll track boats,
track contraband, track the international drug-lords who now leap
over borders with great ease, defeating the police through the
clever use of fragmented national jurisdictions.
JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope of this book. They seem
to me to be very large topics fraught with complications that I am
not fit to judge. I do know, however, that the international,
computer-assisted networking of police, across national boundaries,
is something that Carlton Fitzpatrick considers very important, a
harbinger of a desirable future. I also know that networks by their
nature ignore physical boundaries. And I also know that where you
put communications you put a community, and that when those
communities become self-aware they will fight to preserve themselves
and to expand their influence. I make no judgements whether this is
good or bad. It's just cyberspace; it's just the way things are.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he would have for a twenty-
year- old who wanted to shine someday in the world of electronic law
enforcement.
He told me that the number one rule was simply not to be scared of
computers. You don't need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but
you mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine looks fancy. The
advantages computers give smart crooks are matched by the advantages
they give smart cops. Cops in the future will have to enforce the
law "with their heads, not their holsters." Today you can make good
cases without ever leaving your office. In the future, cops who
resist the computer revolution will never get far beyond walking a
beat.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single message for the
public; some single thing that he would most like the American
public to know about his work.
He thought about it while. "Yes," he said finally. "*Tell* me the
rules, and I'll *teach* those rules!" He looked me straight in the
eye. "I do the best that I can."
Brought to you
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